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(Faber) Becoming God's Children - Religion's Infantilizing Process
(Faber) Becoming God's Children - Religion's Infantilizing Process
M. D. Faber
Copyright 2010 by M. D. Faber
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faber, M. D. (Mel D.)
Becoming God’s children : religion’s infantilizing process / M.D. Faber.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–313–38226–0 (hard copy : alk. paper) – ISBN 978–0–313–38227–7 (ebook)
1. Christianity—Psychology. 2. Christianity—Controversial literature. 3. Emotional maturity—
Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
BR110.F33 2010
261.5´15—dc22 2009050949
ISBN: 978–0–313–38226–0
EISBN: 978–0–313–38227–7
14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper
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For Erin Faber
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Contents
Preface ix
Chapter One Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 1
Chapter Two The Developmental Context: Psychology, 19
Neurology, and Magic
Chapter Three 73
Part One The Infantilizing Process 73
Part Two Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 139
Chapter Four Growing Up: A Concluding Word 191
Index 199
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Preface
Acknowledgments
I wish to express my gratitude to the staff of the library at the University of
California, Irvine, for assisting me in a variety of ways as I strove to complete
the project. I want also to thank Jack Rattelman for his many valuable com-
ments on the analysis as it began to take shape in earnest. Finally, I must com-
mend Ms. Jaina Kennedy for her splendid preparation of a manuscript that
was not always easy to decipher, and Ms. Diana Marsan for her outstanding
editorial assistance.
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the Issue
of Infantilization
Thematic Vignettes
Dressed entirely in white and kneeling solemnly before the administering
priest, a young male stockbroker in Manhattan is undergoing the rite of Holy
Baptism. ‘‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit,’’ pronounces the cleric as he pours water three times over the
candidate’s head. Shortly thereafter, the priest anoints the supplicant with
sacred chrism, a perfumed oil consecrated by the bishop and signifying the
gift of the Holy Spirit to the newly baptized one who is now, officially, free
of sin and reborn as a child of God. ‘‘Baptism is the sacrament of regeneration
through water in the Word,’’ says the priest as the ceremony draws to a close.
‘‘It is the basis of the whole Christian life.’’1 Glowing with the completion of
the rite as he turns to family and friends, the young stockbroker thinks to
himself, ‘‘I’m reborn, actually reborn! My life is commencing all over again,
through Christ!’’ Glancing at his father and mother specifically, he feels
a bit confused as he recalls the Biblical injunction that he is now obliged
to love Jesus more than he loves his own biological parents (Matt. 10:37).2
He resolves to ask a priest about that in the coming weeks.
~
Sitting silently in a pew of Toronto’s Episcopal Church of St. Luke, a
middle-aged schoolteacher prays ardently for the recovery of her young
grandson who has been seriously injured in an automobile accident. ‘‘Dear
Lord,’’ she says inwardly, addressing an all-powerful Deity whom she
alternately calls her Father, ‘‘grant Your healing energies to this boy, so that
he may recover and live a full, rewarding life.’’ She goes on, ‘‘I ask You this
submissively, humbly, helplessly, as I depend fully upon Your goodness and
mercy, upon Your unconditional love for all Your children, and I beseech
2 Becoming God’s Children
You faithfully in the name of Your only begotten Son, Christ Jesus. It is
written in Your Book, Father, that if I ask I shall receive. Please, let it be so.’’
A moment later as the woman exits the church and makes her way to the
nearby hospital where her grandson lies injured, she experiences the sweet,
unmistakable sensation of having ‘‘made contact.’’ She can feel the Lord
manifesting His divine presence within her through the working of the
Holy Spirit. ‘‘He’s there,’’ she remarks to herself. ‘‘He’s heard my prayer.’’
~
Strolling tranquilly through her sunny backyard located in a suburb of
Kansas City, Missouri, a young housewife and mother of three dwells in her
mind on the lovely old hymn she sang in church the previous Sunday.
‘‘How beautiful are these words,’’ she thinks to herself. ‘‘And how true! How
often have I heard the Lord Jesus calling to me; how often have I felt I was walk-
ing with Him, talking with Him, listening to Him as He told me I belonged to
Him.’’ Her radiant feelings of closeness and security, of connection and love,
remain with her during the next few hours as she goes about her daily chores.
~
Ensconced within a chapel of Paris’s colossal Cathedral of Notre Dame
(Our Lady), an elderly, retired French physician is about to experience Holy
Communion, a religious ceremony in which he has participated many, many
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 3
times during the course of his long life. He is not alone. Kneeling with a dozen
other worshipers who have come to receive the holy sacraments, he listens
attentively as the priest gives thanks to the Father, through Christ, in the Holy
Spirit, for all His works: creation, redemption, and sanctification. He listens as
the priest proceeds to ask the Father to send his Holy Spirit onto the bread and
the wine so that they may become, actually become, the body and the blood of
Jesus Christ. As the priest raises the Host aloft while reciting the Lord’s Prayer,
our elderly communicant awaits patiently his turn to take the body of his God
into his mouth and swallow Him down into his stomach. Walking along the
banks of the Seine later in the day, the good doctor reminds himself theologi-
cally that he now has within his own body the body of another Person/God,
namely, Jesus who became a person 2,000 years earlier and also that he is
now in the body of another person; he is now in Christ just as Christ is within
him. The divine, mysterious relationship fostered by the Eucharist is fully
reciprocal, a two-way street doctrinally. In addition, he calls to mind the
familial relationship he enjoys with all those who have taken the Person/God
into their bodies, with all those who participate in the Christian family,
in the Christian Church, his spiritual ‘‘mother’’ who embraces him as Her
own, according to the Catechism that resides upon his bookshelf at home.
Resonating emotionally with all these spiritual affiliations and unions, he feels
well prepared for another week of retirement in his beloved Paris.
~
‘‘Just do it, just take a deep breath and do it,’’ a young businessman is
instructed by a Leader in Van Nuys, California, as he struggles to speak in
tongues for the first time. He is sitting in a Pentecostal Church that has among
its congregation several individuals of both sexes who possess and who mani-
fest this gift of the Holy Spirit. Finally, after considerable encouragement,
and assurances that his successful performance of this phenomenon will bring
him powerful feelings of blessedness, the young businessman holds forth:
‘‘aish nay gum nay tayo,’’ he pronounces, and then again, ‘‘aish nay gum nay
tayo.’’ That’s all he has to offer on this, his first successful try. ‘‘Thank you,
Lord, thank you,’’ cries the Leader, with his hands still upon the head of the
novice who is now weeping openly and joyously as he feels God’s Holy Spirit
coursing electrically through his body and his mind. Receiving the congratu-
lations of his fellow worshipers, three of whom practice glossolalia themselves,
he can hardly wait to get home and break the wonderful news to his wife.
‘‘This is the best I’ve felt in all my 25 years,’’ he thinks to himself.
~
4 Becoming God’s Children
Reclining in his study one tranquil Sunday evening in October, the pastor
of a small Methodist church in southern England ruminates feelingly on the
loss of his elderly mother to cancer one year earlier. They were very close,
and the pastor sometimes misses his mother deeply. Yet always, at some point in
his ruminations, he reminds himself consolingly that he will see her again,
indeed hold her in his arms again in heaven—God willing of course. The pastor
imagines the next world in the classical late Victorian and early modern
fashion. Families parted by death are reunited in the presence of Christ, as
the omnipotent Almighty looks on from the highest spiritual plane. Within
the pastor’s paradise, there is no toil, no striving, no obligation, no ‘‘progress’’
in an earthly sense, but only beatific visions, mystical light, and robed angels
singing eternal praise while loved ones luxuriate in their togetherness. The pas-
tor glances over to the etching on his writing desk wherein he and his beloved
mother hold each other’s hand and face the rising sun. ‘‘Death, where is thy
sting,’’ the man thinks passionately to himself. His eye then moves to a large,
hardbound volume that recently arrived in the mail and that bears the title
Mapping Paradise. It comprises a history of earthly paradise, starting with
the early Christian era and continuing to the present day. Lavishly illustrated,
it indicates the extent to which humanity has always longed for a paradise on
earth, for a place of emotional and physical perfection in the here and now as
opposed to the eternal hereafter.4 Resolving to peruse this fascinating volume
during the next few weeks, the pastor nods off, with visions of his departed
mother still flickering somewhere in his mind.
Psychological Inquiries
I begin with these vignettes in an effort to indicate in a lively, compelling
way several of the major topics on which I plan to concentrate here. Most
broadly, what are these people doing? What are the mental and emotional
processes, the mental and emotional aims, that inform their behavior? Why
would someone who has already been born and parented seek to be reborn
ritualistically as the child of an invisible god whom he regards explicitly as
his father, or if he follows the New Testament closely, as his ‘‘Abba’’ or
‘‘daddy’’ (Romans 8:15)? Why does Christianity consider this transforma-
tional baptismal rite to be ‘‘the basis of the whole Christian life?’’5 Again,
what are Christians doing when they pray, and how are they instructed to
go about the business by their theological mentors? When Friedrich Heiler
asserts in his classic study of supplication, Prayer, that Christians are expected
to adopt a ‘‘dependent, child-like’’ attitude as they turn to the Almighty, is he
reflecting the universal or orthodox position on the matter?6 Are Christians
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 5
always expected to pray as ‘‘little children’’? If so, why? What does it mean to
claim that a ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ mediates the communication between the earthly
prayer and the supernatural deity who presumably hears and answers? What
is the Holy Spirit anyway? When people assert that they ‘‘feel’’ its ‘‘presence,’’
what do they feel? What constitutes its presence? When a Christian hymn
suggests that Jesus’s ‘‘voice’’ finds its way to the worshiper’s ‘‘ear,’’ that Jesus
‘‘calls’’ upon His followers to ‘‘walk’’ with Him and to ‘‘talk’’ with Him, do
the lyrics imply that worshipers actually hear Jesus’s voice, actually experience
walking and talking with their Savior?
Why would anyone want to eat the body of Jesus, or drink the man’s
blood? Remember, Jesus was an actual person when He walked on earth,
and it is the actual person, Jesus, whom billions of earthly communicants
consume when they participate in the Eucharist. Jesus also was, and is, a
God of course, and the notion of Godhead is always firmly tied to the ritual.
But worshipers don’t consume a Godhead; they consume the sacrificial
Redeemer of the fallen human race, the Lamb of God. Permit me to ask
again, why do they wish to do this? Surely such behavior invites close psycho-
logical scrutiny. Were we to visit some faraway island in some faraway ocean
and find ourselves invited to eat the body of a god in the form of, say, a
coconut, we would instantly put on our thinking caps and ask ourselves,
what’s going on? Somewhere in our minds might lurk the words ‘‘magic’’
or ‘‘mumbo jumbo.’’ We would strive to explain both conduct and myth
as inseparable facets of a peculiar cultural enactment. Why would we not
do the same for the Eucharist? Were we to exempt it from such scrutiny,
would we not be indulging ourselves in the ‘‘us and them’’ kind of thinking
that characterizes former eras, the colonial, Victorian period, for example,
when the ‘‘savages’’ ate the gods and the Christians participated in the
sacred traditions of the church? Eating a god’s body is exactly that whether
one is naked and painted or wearing a business suit. Might the answer to
the question, why do Christians wish to consume Jesus Christ? reside in
the orthodox claim that such consumption triggers an actual, inward, sym-
biotic union between communicant and salvational presence? Those who
swallow Christ immediately dwell in Christ, and Christ as swallowed
immediately dwells in them. Moreover, one’s feeling of being in Christ
and of having Christ inside one is linked theologically to the Holy Spirit
that has descended transformationally on the bread and the wine and thus
awakened the worshiper’s capacity to apprehend God’s presence as the ritual
unfolds. Accordingly, might the psychological nature of the Holy Spirit
have everything to do with the feelings people experience as they participate
in certain magical acts and nothing to do with the putative supernatural
6 Becoming God’s Children
To try to realize that when once we close our eyes in death, we shall never, never
open them again on any happy or absorbing scene, that this pleasant earth will
roll on and on for ages with ourselves no more sensible of what transpires than a
dull clod, that this brief and flickering and bittersweet life is our only glimpse,
our only taste, of existence throughout the billions of infinities of unending
time—to try to realize this, even to phrase such thoughts, can occasion a black,
sinking spell along the pathways of sensation.8
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 7
Who would disagree? But death as human creatures perceive it, feel it, appre-
hend it developmentally and psychodynamically constitutes not only naught-
ment, nothingness, emptiness; it also constitutes a traumatic separation from
the self and from others, both as the self extends into others and as others
are internalized into the self along the way, from the inception of one’s days.
Accordingly, heavenly salvation for Christians is usually social in nature and
tied conceptually to reunion with those they love, those upon whom they
emotionally depend.9 And in this, it harmonizes perfectly with the central
enactments and symbolic representations of the creed, with baptism that
rebirths the believer into eternal union with a loving, unchanging, parental
Deity; with the Eucharist that positions the believer within the body of Christ;
with prayer that ties the believer to the Parent-God through the workings of
the Holy Spirit; with the archetypal view of the Church as mother and womb;
with the congregation of worshipers as family, as brothers and sisters; and on
and on it goes with dozens of related items and nuances. The whole religion
is a complex, magical system for attaching people to other people (‘‘love one
another’’) and to a triune supernatural entity, the Trinity, from Whom the
believer will never be parted (Rom. 8:39). It can hardly come as a surprise,
then, that Christianity’s version of terrestrial paradise, the prelapsarian
Garden, the proverbial heaven on earth, is one in which there is no death,
no separation crisis of mortality, for it is death precisely that humankind’s
parents, Adam and Eve, bring into the world when they transform themselves
from innocent, obedient children of God into rebellious knowledge-seekers,
lapsed immortals who deserve exactly what God gives them, expulsion from
the Garden, the world’s navel, the maternal matrix, an expulsion that renders
mythically our original ‘‘birth’’ as mortals. A fundamental aim of Christianity,
as every Christian knows, is restoring the fallen progeny of Adam and
Eve (all human beings) to their salvational status through the mercies of
Jesus Christ, the worshiper’s heavenly protector and guide. Eternal salvation
is ultimately rescue from the crisis of eternal separation.
adequate to account for all phenomena. There is not, in my view, one single
aspect of Christianity or any other religion, not one, that cannot be fully
and satisfactorily explained along purely naturalistic lines. Note the empha-
sis on explanation. Although I consider religious supernaturalism, whatever
soothing, adaptive potential it may possess, to be a distortion of reality,
an erroneous and regrettable perception of the world around us, I am deter-
mined to subordinate polemics to what I hope is clear, cogent, naturalistic
analysis, the kind that persuades through painstaking empirical procedure
as opposed to rhetorical passion. If readers choose to finish the book, they
can simply make up their minds at the end whether or not the explanation
I offer is convincing.
As for my presentation of Christian beliefs and practices, my sources of
information on the creed, I plan to rely heavily on what Christians are cur-
rently writing and thinking, the books, pamphlets, prayers, hymns, devotion-
als, television shows, and conversations that make up the current ‘‘scene,’’ or
again in the vernacular, ‘‘what’s out there right now.’’ Why am I doing this?
During the period in which I prepared myself for the writing of this book,
I realized more and more deeply that the living Christian religion was speaking
to me vividly, directly, through its present popular expression, through the
work of Billy Graham and his daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, through Robert
H. Schuller and Henry Cloud and Neil T. Anderson, through collections of
Christian prayers and hymns, through pamphlets such as Our Daily Bread,
through Christian television channels and the remarks of Christian men
and women whose immediate, daily lives were inextricably bound up with
their spiritual beliefs. Of course I had to focus persistently on the New
Testament, and I had to pay some attention to Augustine and Martin Luther,
to Thomas Merton and to the Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, and to
many other classical, authoritative, erudite productions past and present. But
were sources such as these to dominate my discussion, the reader might never
hear the voice of Christianity today, the urgent expression of contemporary
people as they revealed their hopes and fears, their wishes and convictions,
in simple, straightforward, and often passionate language to those who were
reading or listening intently, with pressing emotional agendas of their own.
I wanted to capture this accent, this contemporary slant, and I came to
believe that the psychological essence of Christianity might emerge very
nicely, perhaps unforgettably, if the reader were encouraged to detect that
accent, that slant, as he or she moved through the text. Does this mean that
I plan to subordinate the manifold historical variations and issues on the
nature of Christianity as an unfolding religion to a presentation of the creed
as we discover it today in our own Western culture? Yes, it does: that’s exactly
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 9
the kind of book I’m writing. But let me be more specific about the natural-
istic approach I mean to take.
A multilayered, multifaceted system of magical behavior, Christianity as
theology and rite is designed to accomplish nothing less than the veiling, or
perhaps the removal, of our chief biological tormentors, namely, separation,
smallness (or vulnerability), and death, and replace them with a perfectionist
scheme whereby the believer enjoys loving union with a Parent-God from
Whom he will never be parted, protection and empowerment through a
Parent-God Whose omnipotence flows toward His dutiful followers, and
immortality or an escape from death through Jesus Christ’s sacrificial gift,
freely offered to all those who turn to Him sincerely and ask. For everyone
who cries out, ‘‘Save me, Jesus,’’ the Lord will stand biological reality on
its head and furnish the believer with a full-fledged alternate identity to
replace the flawed or imperfect one he or she possesses by virtue of what
the Bible terms ‘‘the Fall.’’ These are the wishful notions that reside at the
core of the creed, the ideas that fuel its theological, ritualistic engine, that
drive its transformational agenda, that convince its devotees to declare both
inwardly and aloud, ‘‘I believe.’’
The magical system is rooted overwhelmingly in memory, particularly
unconscious memory, or implicit memory, or affective memory—felt as
opposed to explicitly recalled, and jogged, or awakened, by a wide variety of
retrieval cues embedded in Christian rite and doctrine, in the magical, reli-
gious happenings in which the worshiper is invited to participate as he actu-
alizes his life as a devotee of the tripartite theological model, namely, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. In this way, the psychological significance of Christianity
is tied inextricably to specific neurological events occurring in the hippocam-
pal, limbic, and amygdalic regions of the brain, as well as in the cortex, or
frontal lobes, the area from which emanates the believer’s rationalization,
the ‘‘intellectual’’ or ‘‘cognitive’’ assent that allows the creed’s supernatural
framework, its inventive, imaginal claims (heaven, hell, angels, devils, and
spirits of all kinds including the tripartite Godhead) to ring true. This is
but another way of saying that the worshiper’s whole brain, both conscious
and unconscious, carries the perceptual weight of the religion’s magical
goings—on the final goal of which is to infantilize the participant, to restore
him mnemonically and transformationally to an idealized version of his
own biological beginnings, to the period in which he was secure in the protec-
tive, loving, salvational care of a big one, a parental shepherd after whom he
followed like a bleating lamb for several crucial years. The magical steps of
the infantilizing process that engenders the worshiper’s alternative identity,
the counterweight to his biological being, are clear, and I will examine each
10 Becoming God’s Children
Spirit, or the Spirit-Person who miraculously finds Its/His way into the life of
the quondam lukewarm practitioner. The putative ‘‘mystery’’ or ‘‘miracle of
grace,’’ however, resides ultimately within the nature of implicit recollection:
the worshiper cannot see what is occurring in his own mind-brain as a
retrieval cue whose provenance is some particular facet of Christian rite and
doctrine (baptism, prayer, the Eucharist, the metaphor of Vine or Shepherd,
or a dozen other related features of creedal literature and practice) awakens a
particular aspect of his own biological beginnings and thus infuses into his
present existence the affective charge of his foundational past. Remember,
every major aspect of Christianity as a whole is devoted to transforming the
worshiper into a ‘‘little child’’ of the Lord: ‘‘Verily I say unto you, Except ye
be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the king-
dom of heaven’’ (Matt. 18.3). When the Holy Spirit reaches the Christian
seeker, it is always in this infantilizing context. Indeed, the infantilizing con-
text is there in the first place to facilitate the Holy Spirit’s transformational
workings in the one who craves a ‘‘salvation’’ that turns out to be nothing
other than union with the Parent-God, existing in the gravitational orbit of
the Big One, following after the sacred Shepherd, depending entirely on the
protection and love of the Lord—in short, rediscovering an idealized version
of exactly the kind of symbiotic relationship one enjoyed during the early
period as a little one, a ‘‘little child’’ in the care of a loving parent. Accord-
ingly, the Holy Spirit is a ‘‘mystery’’ only to those who fail to discern how
the human mind-brain works in specific ideational contexts. When the accent
of consciousness is on a wishful reversion to childhood, the whole mind-brain
will follow that accent.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that the whole of Christianity as it manifests
itself within a given social order boils down to the process of infantilization
that I’m after here. As a full-fledged socioreligious institution, Christianity is
busily involved in education, child care, medical services, charity, counseling,
camping, and a dozen other worthwhile pursuits that engage people at every
level and at every age. One has merely to look around to discern this. I’m sug-
gesting only that Christianity in its theological, doctrinal, ritualistic hearts of
hearts—Christianity as we discover it in the New Testament, on the devo-
tional Christian television channels, and in the theological writings and pro-
nouncements of it sources and purveyors from the Catechism of the Catholic
Church to the myriad inspirational books and pamphlets on the shelf in libra-
ries, bookshops, and in places of worship—Christianity as religion, in short, is
dedicated overwhelmingly, one might even say entirely, to the intellectual,
emotional, and psychological infantilization of all those who turn to it, follow
it, subscribe to it for what we commonly think of as ‘‘spiritual’’ reasons.
12 Becoming God’s Children
The reader may well be thinking in the face of that last sentence, hold it!
You’re reducing complex, variegated theological rites and teachings to a
monolithic psychological/neurological analysis, a theoretical view that picks
and chooses in a manner that supports its own predetermined conclusions.
What fits your notion you seize upon. What doesn’t fit, however significant
it may ultimately be, you simply ignore. My full response to such objections
will be the substance of this book as a whole, of course. But I will say here,
very briefly, that the charge of reductionism in the specific context of Chris-
tianity as an infantilizing process will not hold and should be dropped. There
is just too much supportive material in the major presentational sources
of the religion, in the New Testament, in the popular media, and in the
enormous, even endless Christian literature that we find everywhere around
us, to miss the overwhelming emphasis upon infantilizing the worshiper,
upon transforming him or her into an utterly dependent, utterly submissive,
utterly obedient ‘‘little child’’ following after the explicitly parental figures
of the Almighty Lord and His pastoral Son from Whom he or she continu-
ously seeks provision and protection through prayer. As I just suggested, the
reader will have to wait for the book’s central chapter to appreciate all this
thoroughly, but I want the reader to know right now that I’ve not only con-
sidered the issue of reductionism every step of the way but found myself
amazed again and again at the extent to which the Christian religion is
dedicated to infantilization as the main component of its transformational,
salvational scheme.
Cultic Christianity
The presentation of Jesus in the New Testament is, of course, multidimen-
sional. We find acts of kindness, of mercy, of concern; we find firmness and
authority; we find humility and self-effacement; and we find the ability to sus-
pend the laws of nature, to perform miracles, to walk on water, to heal the sick,
to rise up from the grave. Finally, we find the willingness for supreme self-
sacrifice, limitless service unto others, even to the Cross itself. It is an arresting,
unforgettable portraiture, and its influence upon the development of Western
culture is immeasurable.12 However, from the standpoint of strictly naturalis-
tic, psychological investigation, the standpoint to which I’ve committed
myself unreservedly here, we also find in the depiction of Jesus the familiar
outlines of the cult leader, the self-absorbed, narcissistic personality with the
charismatic, problematical power to work His will upon the gullible, malle-
able followers who find their lives turned upside down as they fall under His
influence, His spell. Karen Armstrong, writing on the origins of Christianity
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 13
in her recent volume The Great Transformation, bluntly describes Jesus for her
readership as ‘‘a Galilean faith-healer.’’13 While Armstrong’s words take us in
the right direction, they ultimately fall short of the mark. We have in Jesus
an individual whose assumptive healing capacities are only a tiny segment of
the extraordinary, astonishing nature He claims for Himself.
Jesus goes about in the belief that He’s divine, a kind of god, the promised
Messiah of Jewish Scriptural tradition, in direct, immediate contact with
mighty supernatural powers. As the be-all and end-all of the world, which
revolves around Him, He lays down the law, or perhaps I should say gives
marching orders, to the mere mortals with whom He interacts. They are to
do whatever He says and to center their lives on His purposes:
And Jesus came and spoke unto them saying, All power is given unto me in
heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them
to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you
always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
(Matt. 28:18–20)
And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter,
and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And he
saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. And they
straightway left their nets, and followed him. And going on from thence,
he saw two other brethren, James the son of Zeb´-e-dee, and John his brother,
in a ship with Zeb´-e-dee their father, mending their nets; and he called them.
14 Becoming God’s Children
And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him. And
Jesus went about all Galilee . . . And his fame went throughout all Syria . . .
And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee, and from
Decapolis, and from Jerusalem. . . .
(Matt. 4:18–25)
Once under his spell, Jesus makes it very clear to His devotees that He is now
the Shepherd and they the sheep: ‘‘I am the good shepherd . . . My sheep hear
my voice, and I know them, and they follow me’’ (John 10:11,27). But the
members of the flock do not merely owe Him their absolute allegiance.
As I noted on the first page of this book, they must substitute Him for their
own real mothers and fathers. They must ‘‘love’’ Him more than their own
parents, and if they are parents, they must love Him more than their
own children:
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that
loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh
not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.
(Matt. 10:37–38)
Jesus declares in effect that He’s the crucial one, not the parent or the child.
Thus ideally His worshipers, His ‘‘sheep,’’ will ‘‘follow after’’ Him at once, at
that very moment, as James and John do earlier. A father such as Zeb´-e-dee
is simply left holding the bag, or, as in this case, his tattered fishing nets.
So much for familial cohesion, familial loyalty, familial order.
Surely at this juncture the reader is beginning to recognize the alarming,
cultic scenario with which he or she is doubtless already familiar in his or
her own troubled, modern society: a grandiose, charismatic individual leads
a band of simple, credulous followers (‘‘fishers’’) into a religious scheme for
changing the world, a scheme that has at its center, of course, the grandiose,
charismatic individual himself. What the Romans finally did to Jesus was
barbaric and disgusting, but let’s face it, they had a very good sense of who
He was and what He was up to. The Roman Empire during this period was rife
with potentially disruptive sects and cults that required constant monitoring
and in certain instances immediate suppression lest Roman rule be compro-
mised. As in our own world today, those who have the power, be they gover-
nors, industrialists, or popes, do not want to see it eroded, even a little bit.
Are we not all sinners?
That Christianity commenced its life as a breakaway Jewish sect with Jesus
as the long-awaited Messiah, then gradually metamorphosed into a sizable
cult as followers from several non-Jewish traditions began to join in, is the
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 15
message from an invisible, three-sided deity, and we say, oh. Vast numbers of
human beings have, of course, been raised with such ideas, and one cannot
exaggerate the impact of early educative experience on young, impressionable
minds, particularly when the education comes from parents, or other figures
of authority who are often distinctively, even sumptuously attired, with
special bonnets, and with grave, weighty expressions on their faces.
The point is, to underscore the cultic nature of Christian theology and rite
is to facilitate our understanding of Christianity’s infantilizing process, for the
aim of all cultic creeds, by which I mean the aim from the top down, is to
establish the cultic leader as the embodiment of all truth and all legitimate
authority, the cultic teachings and rituals as the summation of all worldly
and otherworldly wisdom back to the very beginnings of time, and the cultic
membership as the unquestioning, sheep-like followers of the leader: men,
women, and children who center their lives on the leader and the leader
alone, who look to the leader and only the leader for guidance and protec-
tion—in a word, who become within the constraints of the cultic configura-
tion infantilized human beings upon whom the leader ultimately relies for
the dissemination of his egocentric, grandiose, narcissistic views. When all
is said and done, there is nothing special or even particularly interesting
about cultic Christianity other than the colossal, monumental fact that in
the crapshoot of history it managed somehow to catch on and to steadily
insert itself into the lives and ultimately the traditions of men and women
everywhere. Accordingly, this book on Christianity as infantilization can be
regarded equally as a book on the cultic core, the cultic essence, the cultic
foundation and final nature of the ubiquitous institution that we presently
call the Christian religion.
Notes
1. All the quoted materials in this paragraph are from Joseph Ratzinger, ed.,
Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 1994),
pp. 312, 317.
2. Throughout this book my scriptural citations are from the King James Version
of the Bible (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1978).
3. This popular Christian song can be discovered in many Christian songbooks.
I found the version I’m using here in Barbara Epp’s article, ‘‘Walking and Talking with
God,’’ http://retirementwithapurpose.com/beprayer1.html (accessed November 2,
2005).
4. Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
5. See note 1.
Introduction to the Issue of Infantilization 17
6. See Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion
(Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, [1932] 1997), p. 258.
7. Kimberly Winston writes that ‘‘since the 1960s’’ the practice of glossolalia ‘‘has
leapt from . . . traditionally Pentecostal denominations to mainline Protestant and
Catholic congregations. There are tongue-speaking Methodists, Presbyterians,
Episcopalians, and Catholics.’’ See ‘‘Faith’s Language Barrier?’’USA Today, May 24,
2007, p. 9D.
8. Corliss Lamont, ‘‘The Illusion of Immortality,’’ in Critiques of God, ed. Peter
A. Angeles (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), pp. 261–89. My citation is
from p. 272.
9. See Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 267–75.
10. The expression ‘‘good enough mothering’’ may be found in D. W. Winnicott,
Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971). See pp. 12–14.
11. For the Holy Spirit’s dual nature as both spirit and person, see Billy Graham,
The Holy Spirit (New York: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1978), p. 2. ‘‘The Holy Spirit is
a Person.’’ writes Graham.
12. That Jesus actually existed, that he was a real person as opposed to a mythical
creation, is often debated by scholars and laypersons alike. For a lively recent discus-
sion of the matter, see Patricia Biederman, ‘‘Documentary Questions the Existence
of Jesus,’’ Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2005, p. B2. I personally believe, as do the
vast majority of individuals who have looked into the issue, that Jesus did, in fact,
exist. As for his exact words and actions, we must rely on the New Testament that
was not composed until several decades after His demise. I take the New Testamental
account to be reflective of both the behavior of Jesus and the mind-set of those
who undertook the composition. Accordingly, the New Testament offers us what
we can think of as a truthful narration of the ideational elements that shaped the
Christian religion.
13. Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious
Traditions (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), p. 457.
14. See Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 2003), pp. 11–67. See also Paul Johnson, A History
of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), pp. 21–48.
15. Baptism and the Eucharist have been an integral part of Christian worship
since its earliest days.
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CHAPTER 2
The Developmental
Context: Psychology,
Neurology, and Magic
biological situation. Here are a few specifics. The child is hungry; the child
cries out. Then what happens? The caregiver appears to nourish and to
soothe. The child is frightened; the child cries out. Then what happens?
The caregiver arrives to reassure and to placate. The child is wet and uncom-
fortable; the child cries out. Then what happens? The caregiver appears with
dry garments and ministering hands. The child is injured; the child cries out.
What then? The caregiver comes forward to examine, and kiss, and ‘‘make
better.’’ Over and over again, dozens of times each day, hundreds of times
each week, thousands of times each month, for years, the little one asks and
the big one, the care-giving, all-powerful parent, sees to it that the little one
receives. (The New Testamental formula for the heartfelt prayer that draws
down the Holy Spirit is, ask and ye shall receive [Matt. 7:7].)1 Accordingly,
life’s early stages are characterized by what we can think of as a continuous
biological rhythm of expressive need and timely care, an endless series of cri-
ses and rescues, of asking and receiving, and in every instance it is a helpless,
dependent little one who expresses the need, who does the asking, and it is a
nourishing, succoring, protective big one who performs the requested,
required ministrations. One would be hard-pressed to discover within the
realm of nature another example of physiological and emotional condition-
ing to compare with this one in both depth and duration. Let’s bear in mind
that the basic biological situation is quite literally ‘‘a matter of life and death.’’
The child is utterly dependent upon the all-powerful provider for his or her
very survival. A newly born zebra is up and running (sometimes for its life)
a few minutes after emerging from its mother’s womb; by contrast, the
human infant has no resource but its cry for many, many months after its
appearance on the planet. In this way, what happens early on is destined to
‘‘imprint’’ itself upon the child’s developing brain, to forge permanent, spe-
cialized, synaptic connections at the root of the child’s perceptual existence.
But more of that in a moment.
The little one’s drive, or urge, to attach himself to the parent, indeed to
elicit from the parent his life-giving nourishment, is sustained and strength-
ened by affect, a motive to action that is felt and not merely apprehended
as an end. The basic biological situation is not a mechanical process but a
living, emotional symbiosis streaked with powerful, dynamic feelings in both
directions, with what we generally and informally call ‘‘love,’’ and also with
anxiety because caregiving and care receiving are far from perfect and often
encounter delay and even some sharp dissatisfaction. As it turns out, anxiety,
delay, and dissatisfaction only increase the presence of positive affect as needs
are finally met, provided that discomfort does not become severe or unbear-
able. Thus, the child’s instinctual endowment is not simply linked to affect;
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 21
volume Searching for Memory.4 Daniel J. Siegel expresses it this way in his
equally celebrated book The Developing Mind: ‘‘The mind emerges from the
substance of the brain as it is shaped by interpersonal relationships.’’5 And
again, ‘‘At birth, the infant’s brain is the most undifferentiated organ in the
body. Genes and early experience shape the way neurons connect to one
another and thus form specialized circuits that give rise to mental processes’’
(p. 14). And finally, ‘‘Experiences early in life have a tremendously important
impact on the developing mind’’ (p. 14). The point is, when the Christian
believer suddenly, spontaneously senses the inward or outwardly hovering
presence of an empathetic ‘‘spiritual’’ entity, or when he accedes with strong
emotion to the idea that a benign divinity resides within or watches over
him, he is recontacting, or relocating, the benign internalization, the benign
inward relationship, upon which his life and well-being have been founded.
He makes contact easily with the supernatural domain because in a manner
of speaking he has been there all along. He has been living with or in the com-
pany of powerful, unseen, life-sustaining presences since he commenced the
process of mind-body internalization, of interactional, physiological imprint-
ing, as it naturally and persistently arose from his affective interaction with the
all-powerful provider, the big one who appeared over and over again,
10,000 times, to rescue him from hunger and distress, and to respond to
his emotional and interpersonal needs, to his deep affective drive for attach-
ment. The ‘‘mystery’’ of the indwelling (or suddenly present) Lord has
existed for millennia, and still exists, because individuals are unable to see
and to analyze their early, internalizing, neural development as human
beings, the originative unconscious aspect of themselves that responds
affirmatively, or accedes to, the religious narratives they are offered con-
sciously as the early period gives way to the verbal, symbolic stage of their
lives. Of course the Deity becomes doctrinally complexified (and moralized)
as an individual’s existence develops over time, but the Deity’s naturalistic
origins in human psychobiology are always at the foundation of His living
presence in the world. Arising from the peculiarity of our brain, the super-
natural divine is our peculiar invention.
internalized materials and the powerful affect that is attached to those materi-
als. As Schacter notes, ‘‘Brain structures that support implicit memory are in
place before the systems needed for explicit memory.’’6 Although implicit
memory ‘‘operates outside our awareness, . . . it is a pervasive influence in all
our lives, and . . . it affects everyday situations’’ (p. 10). Thus, our neuronal,
mental, and emotional makeup predisposes us as perceiving creatures to what
is called in the neuropsychological literature ‘‘mnemonic priming’’ or the
emergence of ‘‘state-dependent’’ memory systems: when temporally disparate
experiences are associated by virtue of similarities between key experiential
elements, the later occurrence is not merely ‘‘colored’’ by the earlier one;
it is interpreted through mnemonic ‘‘feedback loops’’ (or ‘‘engrams’’) that forge
a perceptual connection between present and past events. The state of hunger
in the present triggers unconscious (and perhaps conscious) recollection of
such states as we knew them both three months ago and during the early
phase of our development. Danger signals in the present ‘‘prime’’ us to be on
guard in a manner that reflects the way we reacted to danger in the past, all
the way back to the inception of our experience as people. This is what
we mean by ‘‘the unconscious.’’ As I suggested toward the commencement
of this chapter, our human lives are perceptual and emotional continuities.
‘‘Priming occurs independent of conscious memory,’’ writes Schacter; the
‘‘retrieval cue reinstates or matches the original encoding’’ (pp. 167, 60).
Accordingly, as Siegel observes, ‘‘Our earliest experiences shape our ways of
behaving, including patterns of relating to others, without our ability to recall
consciously when these first learning experiences occurred.’’ We ‘‘act, feel, and
imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present
reality.’’ Studies of ‘‘children and adults suggest that here-and-now perceptual
biases are based on these nonconscious mental models, . . . on what has
occurred in the past.’’7 Emotional events, states Michael S. Gazzaniga in his
recent volume The Ethical Brain, frequently turn into recurring memories at
both the explicit and implicit levels of mnemonic processing. ‘‘Our own
unconscious feelings’’ can ‘‘affect how we encode information and what infor-
mation we retrieve from memory.’’8 Gazzaniga declares in a pivotal remark
that we must bear in mind henceforth, ‘‘Memory is not so much a mechanism
for remembering the past as a means to prepare for the future’’ (p. 141). Now,
as we wed the notions of ‘‘priming’’ and ‘‘state-dependent memory’’ to the
notions of ‘‘internalization’’ and ‘‘neural imprinting,’’ we come to a watershed
in this brief summary of the thesis.
Christian experience thrives upon the triggering of state-dependent
memory, upon the priming of the individual to associate unconsciously his
current experience with the early, life-sustaining, originative experience of
24 Becoming God’s Children
parental ministration and care. Erik H. Erikson expresses it this way in Insight
and Responsibility:
What begins as hope in the individual infant is in its mature form faith, a sense
of superior certainty not essentially dependent upon evidence or reason. . . .
Christianity has shrewdly played into man’s most child-like needs, not only by
offering eternal guarantees for an omniscient power’s benevolence (if properly
appeased) but also by magic words and significant gestures, soothing sounds
and soporific smells—an infant’s world.9
And again, this time from Young Man Luther, Christianity works to gratify
‘‘the simple and fervent wish for a hallucinatory sense of unity with a maternal
matrix’’ (my emphasis).10 We can enrich ‘‘hallucinatory’’ with the notion of
state-dependent memory. However, an individual does not require a formal
religious setting to become ‘‘primed’’ for religious experience. Such priming
frequently occurs as the individual merely deals with the vicissitudes of his
life. Here is a brief, homely example, the sort that turns up routinely in Chris-
tian (and other) bookshops. A young male farmer on foot discovers himself
lost in a ferocious blizzard. Darkness has descended, and the temperature is
falling fast. After wandering fruitlessly about for nearly an hour, the man
panics and then inwardly cries out for divine assistance. A few seconds later,
miraculously, he has the powerful, unmistakable sensation of a benign, pro-
tective presence appearing at his side. (He later refers to this entity as his
guardian angel.) Calmed and reassured, the young farmer trudges on, and
within 10 minutes finds himself upon the old footpath that leads directly to
his farmhouse and his fireplace. He remains convinced to this day that
God, working through the angels, delivered him from a dangerous, perhaps
deadly, situation.11 Surely, the naturalistic explanation of all this is perfectly
clear from the context. An immediate crisis (a state of danger) triggers the
implicit memory of rescue at the hands of a loving provider, perhaps the oldest
and most persistent memory grooved into our brains by our experience in the
world. Indeed, what occurs here is a virtual metaphor of the basic biological
situation itself. The infant is hungry (crisis); the infant cries out (proto-
prayer). Then what happens? The caregiver arrives to nourish and to soothe
(rescue). Because our young farmer cannot grasp the workings of his mind
and emotions, he projectively attributes this simple, natural occurrence to
divine or supernatural sources in keeping with the supernatural narratives
to which he has been exposed. The affective power of unconscious memory,
released by an arresting version of the deep biological past, fosters an unshak-
able, heartfelt belief in the putative supernatural sphere and the succoring,
spiritual denizens thereof.
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 25
Whitmer notes that during infancy and early childhood, or ‘‘before the
child understands the representational nature of ideas and feelings,’’ what
the mother presents to her offspring comprises his ‘‘reality.’’ Because the neo-
nate inhabits what is sometimes called the presubjective realm of psychic
equivalency wherein perception and interpretation are ‘‘identical processes’’
and sensorial experience is ‘‘unmediated’’ by cognitional awareness, the
parent or the adult who ‘‘responds to the child’’ provides him with a
‘‘medium’’ in which he can perceive his experiential world ‘‘in tangible form.’’
Thus it is ‘‘the mother’s words, gestures, and emotional expression’’ that guide
the newcomer ‘‘to his own mind.’’ By ‘‘finding an image of himself in his
mother’s mind,’’ by seeing his idea or fantasy represented in the caregiver’s
mentality, the child is able to create and to structure his own thought pro-
cesses, his own selfhood, and to discover his way toward his own unique
participation in the world (pp. 819–20). Obviously this is a crucial, even
dangerous period for the infant-child, one that can lead to perceptual distor-
tion and affective disturbance. But in the vast majority of instances, where
mothering is ‘‘good enough’’ to foster normal development, the early period
provides the budding individual with a secure foundation for his emerging
identity.13 What we must bear in mind above all as we approach Christianity
is that the representation of self and world that emerges here does not com-
prise merely ‘‘one view among many.’’ Rather, the early foundational experi-
ence ‘‘has the impact of singular truth’’ and is adopted by the child as the
very core of the self. The caregiver’s impact on her offspring actually triggers
the sensation of ‘‘me.’’ The child cannot at this stage say to the parent, ‘‘you
misunderstand me’’ because no ‘‘me’’ exists ‘‘apart from the parent’s under-
standing.’’ Thus, the ‘‘reality’’ of the caregiver does not become a ‘‘reality’’
for the child; it becomes the only ‘‘reality,’’ the only ‘‘place’’ in which he has
existence. As for dissociation, it constitutes, as Whitmer sees it, the ‘‘pathologi-
cal form’’ of this presubjective mode of relating to another person (p. 820).
We may begin to grasp in earnest, now, the decisive, all-important role of
infantile amnesia in the onset and advent of Christian conviction. As the
child finds his way toward the supernatural divine, he discovers a sphere that
bears a striking, uncanny resemblance to the experiential world in which he
has been dwelling right along through his presubjective interactions with
the caregiver, the ultimate source of his most persistent and powerful implicit
memories, the ultimate source of his perceptual, affective core, his selfhood,
his psychological structure, his very ‘‘me-ness.’’ To put it another way, the
religious realm into which the child gradually enters mirrors unconsciously,
associatively, perceptually, and affectively, the presubjective ‘‘reality’’ that the
child has been internalizing and installing neurally as the basis of his
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 27
for successful supplication, as we see in a later section. We note also the prayer-
ful requests for assistance, for succor, for protection and nourishment (one’s
‘‘daily bread’’), as well as the expressions of gratitude and love. To proceed at
once to the heart of the matter, we note the supplicator acting out an unerring
metaphorical version of the basic biological situation, the primal symbiotic
attachment, in which the helpless, dependent little one calls on the omnipotent
big one for physical and emotional sustenance, for the continuation and the
enhancement of life. Thousands upon thousands of times, for years, the child
has experienced and internalized this arrangement, this condition, this state,
and now as he moves toward the Christian domain, he is instructed to recreate
it again and again through prayer. The upshot is clear: Christianity’s chief
ritual, its essential rite, its sine qua non, is designed to foster in the supplicator
regardless of his age or circumstance an implicit, state-dependent memory of
the parent-child relationship from which his self-structure, his identity, his
existence initially arose. Prayer returns the pray-er unconsciously to the inter-
nalized root of his being and thus triggers a sense of God’s loving presence that
has ‘‘the impact of singular truth.’’ Just doing this is enough to awaken the old
feelings of dependency, connection, and care. Just doing this is enough to
arouse the oldest and most persistent implicit memory that we retain at the
affective, neurological level. One has only to ask in order to receive (Matt. 7:7).
One has only to ask in order to make contact with a loving, supportive presence
on the ‘‘other side,’’ a loving, supportive being from the putative supernatural
sphere. Of course the supplicator knows that his Lord is present: he can feel
the Lord within by virtue of his having internalized into his mind-brain the
daily, hourly, moment-to-moment presence of his loving, all-powerful, care-
giving provider during the weeks, months, and years of the early period. What
we can term only a massive affective and neuronic conditioning has prepared
him psychically for the uncanny sensation of the Almighty’s engendering close-
ness. It is in this naturalistic, psychological way, and in this way alone, that
prayer is able to ‘‘prove’’ the presence of God, the ‘‘miracle’’ of His caring,
responsive existence. Thus, Christianity turns out once again to comprise a
fresh neural ‘‘mapping’’ onto a well-established neural and affective ‘‘reality.’’
It derives its attractive power, its validity as a ‘‘supernatural’’ enterprise, from
precisely the realm of implicit, state-dependent memory, from precisely the
condition of infantile amnesia that loads the potential practitioner up with
proto-religious beliefs and sentiments that he cannot cognitionally locate, let
alone fathom. The way is open for the projection of purely inward materials
(one’s religious ‘‘convictions’’) onto the external world, as well as for the estab-
lishment of Christianity’s timeless, official ‘‘mysteries’’: it is the ‘‘innocent’’ who
‘‘see.’’ It is the ‘‘child’’ who apprehends the deepest religious truths and who
30 Becoming God’s Children
possesses thereby the key to the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3). It hardly
needs to be added that billions of ‘‘innocent children’’ currently inhabit
the Earth.
The external, explicit supports for religious belief, the aspects of Christianity
with which we are all thoroughly familiar, are tied integrally to the uncon-
scious, implicit foundation and make the religion’s doctrinal, supernatural
claims overwhelmingly persuasive. Obviously such claims take on a life of
their own, but their lifeblood flows afresh as each generation internalizes
and subsequently projects its primal interactions with the care-giving parent.
Christian doctrine would be empty of meaning were it not unconsciously
grounded in the basic biological situation of dependency, succor, and love.
Indeed, as we have just seen, the presubjective period primes the young
believer affectively and neurologically for the transcendent rituals and narra-
tives to which he is now regularly exposed. Religious attachment is reattach-
ment. Religious presentations re-present the past through the workings
of implicit, state-dependent memory. The child listened to the parent’s
verbalizations and took his direction and comfort therefrom. Now he listens
to the Omnipotent’s ‘‘word,’’ directly as it is proffered in His Book or indi-
rectly as it is explained by His official, authoritative interpreters—the priest
or the pastor, each in his distinctive and sometimes splendid trappings.
The young worshiper is told to sit still and pay attention. He sees his parents
doing exactly what he is told to do. He sees hundreds, perhaps thousands of
others similarly busying themselves with holy books and supplications, read-
ing, pondering, mumbling, discussing, standing up and sitting down on
command, crossing themselves. In the company of his parents, who also
instruct him, he gazes at churches, cathedrals, stained glass, gigantic columns,
and domes. He hears chanted prayers, harmonic, mesmeric hymns, sonorous
sermons, and pronouncements. He is swept along in processions, swept up in
festivals, kissed, and congratulated for his loyal participation. What child
could resist, particularly as ritual and narrative, including, above all, the rite
of supplication and the story of the loving Parent-God, continually echo, or
mirror, the unconscious shape of his own experience as it transpired during
the years that precede the advent of symbolic enactments and expressions?
The variations from culture to culture and from child to child are, of course,
notable; yet the underlying neural, affective, causative factors apply generally,
worldwide, across the centuries, down to the present day.
The point arises: is not the ‘‘map’’ of the early period only the first in a
series of ‘‘spiritual’’ maps, a series that is characterized by increasing moral
and theological complexity that mirrors our development over the years,
indeed over an entire life span? I reply as follows: assuredly this is so.
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 31
However, all the spiritual maps that are devised and entered with time’s pas-
sage are based upon the first one, which reflects the early period. The initial,
unconscious, internalized experience with the loving, care-giving provider
holds the primal, ‘‘eternal’’ source of Christianity’s affective power, the
primal, foundational source of its compelling, persistent appeal, its mystery,
its resistance to logic and reason. The initial map in the depths of the mind
is the powerhouse. To dislodge it, deconstruct it, destroy it in one way or
another is quite simply to lose the living power of one’s faith, to dry up reli-
giously, to abandon the holy, life-giving waters in which the ‘‘children’’ and
the ‘‘innocent’’ bathe their minds and spirits. Christianity thrives when its
adherents remain in close touch with the infantile level of their development,
preserving their early, projective realities, their implicit memories of primal
symbiosis, of magical asking and magical receiving from the omnipotent
parental creator and provider. Although one can grow ‘‘spiritually,’’ there is
no growing out of the infantile stage. Bear in mind, I am not writing about
theism here, or rational arguments concerning the ultimate origin of the uni-
verse. I am writing about emotional, heartfelt belief in an anthropomorphic,
tripartite God Who is concerned with and responsive to the idiosyncratic
wishes and needs of individual worshipers. Precisely this kind of belief is a
natural, projective outgrowth of implicitly recollected parental ministrations
in infancy. Were we loved parentally in the beginning? Well, we still are.
The beginning is now. It is always now in that sense where Christianity is
concerned. We are never without a parent unless we choose to be by rejecting
the existence of a loving, supernatural Provider. If we are ‘‘theological ani-
mals,’’ as some maintain,15 then we are such because our ‘‘theology’’ fits in
smoothly with our ‘‘adult’’ perception of the universe around us. What after
all can interfere with the belief in a supernatural system that does not require
a single empirical fact to substantiate its claims and that is felt to be true at the
deepest inward level by those who fervently wish it to be so? For secularists, of
course, the Christian ‘‘program’’ is irrelevant, or perhaps unengaging, because
it has been replaced by other ‘‘programs,’’ by other neural, perceptual connec-
tions, by other narratives, by other theoretical outlooks and conclusions.
To put the matter crudely, Christians continue to be emotionally and
intellectually susceptible to facets of the mind-brain to which secularists are
susceptible no longer.
at this juncture. On the one hand, we want to feel safe in the world, con-
nected to the matrix, attached to a meaningful, even loving universe; we want
as much security and as little anxiety as possible. On the other hand, we want
to see, to perceive things as accurately as we can, to clear away the mist of
wishful, illusory ideas no matter what the price we have to pay in emotional
discomfort, including the discomfort that may arise from an awareness of
our mortality. Is there another aspect of our fundamental humanity that goes
off like this in two opposing yet perfectly natural directions? However, we
can’t simply plunge into these issues armed only with a preliminary under-
standing of our theoretical position as presented in the context. We must
sharpen and deepen the particulars of our approach, grow them as it were,
in preparation for the conclusions that will eventually emerge. Let’s look,
first, at the all-important emotional events that rest upon the axis of separa-
tion and attachment.
Regardless of the geographical location and the nature of familial organiza-
tion, the conflict between separation and merger not only dominates the life
of the infant but extends itself far beyond infancy and childhood into the life
of the adolescent and adult. It revolves around the struggle to become an
autonomous, separate person, differentiated and distinct, and at the same
time, to retain one’s connection to significant others—either the actual
parents or their later substitutes in a protean variety of shapes and forms.
For the human creature (as I indicated in the previous paragraph), two of
life’s most powerful needs are, paradoxically, to be joined and to be separate,
to be related and to be independent, to be autonomous and to be connected;
and it is precisely this paradoxical and in some sense contradictory thrust in
human growth and development, this antithetical, two-sided inclination of
people, that makes human behavior so problematical, so maddeningly diffi-
cult to see and to fathom, and that brings so much confusion to the lives of
individuals and societies. Ethel S. Person, in her wonderful book Dreams of
Love and Fateful Encounters, renders the matter this way: ‘‘Without self-will
there can be no psychological separation. But neither is there any highly indi-
viduated self. The self is delineated only through separation, but the sense of
being separated proves impossible to bear. The solitary self feels cut off, alone,
without resources. The solitary self feels impelled to merge with a new
object.’’16 What Dr. Person has captured, if I may be permitted to indicate
the issue still again, is that the two needs, to be separate and joined, indepen-
dent and connected, are from a deep psychological angle one need neither
side of which finds expression without engaging the other, like a crab going
backward and forward at the same time. When the desire for merger is felt,
it typically engages the need to be separate, and the need to be separate
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 33
engages the wish to be connected, joined. While it is easy to write about the
matter, to employ such terms as alogical, paradoxical, and antithetical, it
can be most unpleasant to experience the actual conflict when it occurs, along
with the inner confusion that it often engenders. I would suggest, in fact, that
we have here a major source of human stress.
Because the world of infancy and childhood is not an easy one to capture
discursively, because as adults we run the risk of ascribing to the very young
aims and motives at work in us rather than in them, I would prefer to explore
the Christian realm psychologically without also exploring life’s early period,
but alas, there is just no hope of getting at the truth that way. Christian
behavior is an outgrowth, a development, in a special sense an expression of
this period with its symbiotic attachments, its blissful transformations, its
powerful, persistent anxieties, attunements, frustrations, and fears. Indeed,
if the science of psychology has made a lasting and valuable contribution to
the understanding of ‘‘spiritual’’ conduct, it is in precisely this area. From
the many psychological accounts of infancy and childhood, I choose what is
generally regarded as the most methodologically sophisticated, accurate, and
helpful, namely, Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman’s Psycho-
logical Birth of the Human Infant.17 A child psychiatrist and pediatrician
working with normal children in a specially constructed facility in New York
City during the 1950s and 1960s, Mahler (and her associates) places the
accent immediately on the struggle between separation and union.
We take for granted, she reminds us, our experience of ourselves as both
fully ‘‘in’’ and fully separate from the ‘‘world out there’’ (p. 3). Our conscious-
ness of ourselves as distinct, differentiated entities and our concomitant
absorption into the external environment, without an awareness of self, are
the polarities between which we move with varying ease, and with varying
degrees of alternation or simultaneity. Yet the establishment of such con-
sciousness, such ordinary, taken-for-granted awareness, is a slowly unfolding
process that is not coincident in time with our biological emergence from
the womb. It is tied closely and developmentally to our dawning experience
of our bodies as separate in space and belonging only to us, and to our dawn-
ing experience of the primary love object as also separate in space, as having
an existence of his or her own. Moreover, the struggle to achieve this
‘‘individuation’’ reverberates throughout the course of our lives: ‘‘It is never
finished; it remains always active; new phases of the life cycle find new
derivatives of the earliest processes still at work’’ (p. 3). What must be
stressed, in particular, here is the strength of both sides of the polarity.
Children, with every move toward maturation, are confronted with the threat
of ‘‘object loss,’’ with traumatic situations involving separation from the
34 Becoming God’s Children
caregiver. Thus they are constantly tempted to draw back, to regress, to move
toward the caregiver and the old relation as opposed to away from the care-
giver and the anticipated future, the new reality. At the same time, the
normally endowed child strives mightily to emerge from his early fusion
(we could say confusion) with the mother, to escape and to grow. His indi-
viduation consists precisely of those developmental achievements, those
increasing motor and mental accomplishments, that begin to mark his
separate existence, his separate identity as a separate being. The ambivalent
impulses toward and away, the great urge to differentiate and at the same time
stay connected, are in Mahler’s words, forever intertwined (p. 4), although
they may proceed divergently, one or the other lagging behind or leaping
ahead during a given period.
Mahler makes plain that this process is not merely one of many equally
important processes that transpire during the early time. On the contrary,
the achievement of separation constitutes the very core of the self, the founda-
tion of one’s identity and being as a person. Yet this foundation can be gained
(and here is the echo of a paradox again) only if the parent gives to the child a
persistent, uninterrupted feeling of connection, of union—a tie that encour-
ages the very breaking of it. This delicate balancing act is never perfect, and
Mahler emphasizes throughout the course of her study that old conflicts over
separation, old, unresolved issues of identity and bodily boundaries, can be
reawakened or even remain active throughout the course of one’s existence,
at any or all stages of the life cycle. What appears to be a struggle for connec-
tion or distinctness in the now of one’s experience can be the flare-up of the
ancient struggle in which one’s self began to emerge from the orbit of the
magna mater. We will shortly be exploring the degree to which this last obser-
vation sheds light upon one facet of Christianity in which the practitioner
longs to be absorbed into the supernatural body of the Deity. By separation,
then, Mahler does not mean primarily the physical separation of the baby
in space or the distance from the caregiver, the kind of separation we associ-
ate, for example, with the work of John Bowlby. What Mahler has in mind
is an inward or intrapsychic separation from both the mother and her exten-
sion, the world. The gradual development of this subjective awareness, this
inward perception of the self and the other, leads eventually to clear, distinct
inner representations of a ‘‘self ’’ that is distinguished from ‘‘external objects.’’
It is precisely this sense of being a separate individual that psychotic children
are unable to achieve. Similarly, when Mahler uses the term ‘‘symbiosis,’’ the
accent is not upon a behavioral state but an inward condition, a feature of
primitive emotional life wherein the differentiation between the self and the
mother has not occurred, or where a regression to an undifferentiated state
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 35
has occurred. This does not necessarily require the presence of the mother;
it can be based on primitive images of oneness, or on a denial of percep-
tions that postulate separation. Thus for Mahler, identity during the early
period does not refer to the child having a sense of who he is; it refers to
the child having a sense that he is (p. 8). Indeed, the sense that he is can be
regarded as the first step in the process of an unfolding individuality. The
achievement of separation-individuation is a kind of ‘‘second birth,’’ a
‘‘hatching’’ from the symbiotic mother-infant ‘‘membrane’’ in which the
child is originally contained (p. 9).
Mahler calls the earliest stage of development ‘‘autistic.’’ The infant
‘‘spends most of his day in a half-sleeping, half-waking state’’ (p. 41).
He awakens mainly to feed and falls to sleep again when he is satisfied, or
relieved of tensions. There is nothing abnormal about this ‘‘autism,’’ as Mahler
employs the term. The baby simply lacks awareness of the mother as a minis-
tering agent and of himself as the object of her ministrations. From the second
month on, however, the baby increasingly feels the presence of the mother,
and it is just this sense of the caretaker being there that marks the inception
of the normal symbiotic phase, which reaches a peak of intensity at about six
to nine months. The most remarkable feature of this phase is contained
in Mahler’s point that the infant ‘‘behaves and functions as though he and
his mother were an omnipotent system—a dual-unity with one common
boundary’’ (p. 44). The symbiotic infant participates emotionally and per-
ceptually in a kind of delusional fusion with the omnipotent mothering
figure. Later in infancy and childhood, and indeed later in life at all stages
when we experience severe stress, ‘‘this is the mechanism to which the ego
regresses’’ (p. 44).
In this way, when the autistic phase subsides, or, to use the metaphors char-
acteristic of Mahler’s treatise, when the ‘‘autistic shell’’ has ‘‘cracked’’ and the
child can no longer ‘‘keep out external stimuli,’’ a ‘‘second protective, yet
selective and receptive shield’’ begins to develop in the form of the ‘‘symbiotic
orbit,’’ the mother and the child’s dual-unity. While the normal autistic phase
serves postnatal physiological growth and homeostasis, the normal symbiotic
phase marks the all-important human capacity to bring the mother into a psy-
chic fusion that comprises ‘‘the primal soil from which all subsequent relation-
ships form’’ (p. 48). We commence our existence as people in the illusion that
the other (who appears to be omnipotent) is a part of the self. Although the
mother is actually out there, ministering to the child, she is perceived by the lat-
ter to be a facet of his own organism, his own primitive ego. What the mother
‘‘magically’’ accomplishes in the way of care—the production of milk, the pro-
vision of warmth, the sensation of security—the baby omnipotently attributes
36 Becoming God’s Children
bodily awareness and sensation. At times, the baby even begins to move away
from the mother’s enveloping arms, to resist the passive ‘‘lap babyhood’’ that
marks the earliest months of life. As he does this, however, he constantly
‘‘checks back’’ to mother with his eyes. He is becoming interested in mother
as ‘‘mother’’ and compares her with ‘‘other’’ people and things. He discovers
what belongs and what does not belong to the mother’s body—a brooch,
eyeglasses, a comb. He is starting to discriminate, in short, between the
mother and all that which is different from or similar to her (pp. 54–55).
This incipient individuation on the baby’s part is accompanied by consid-
erable anxiety, the most striking manifestation of which occurs in the pres-
ence of strangers. Like so much else in the area of separation-union,
‘‘stranger anxiety’’ evinces two distinct yet interrelated aspects. On the one
hand, strangers fascinate the infant, who, in Mahler’s words, shows great
‘‘eagerness to find out about them.’’ On the other hand, strangers terrify the
infant by reminding him of the other-than-mother world, the world of sepa-
ration, the world that appears as symbiosis and dual-unity fade. After point-
ing out that babies vary in their susceptibility to stranger anxiety (and other
anxiety as well), Mahler offers us the example of Peter, who at eight months
reacts initially with wonder and curiosity to a stranger’s mild overtures for
his attention. Yet, two minutes later, although he is close to his mother, even
leaning against her leg, Peter bursts into tears as the stranger touches his hair
(p. 57). Such is the emotional turbulence that accompanies the onset of
individuation during the first subphase (pp. 56–57).
Mahler divides the second subphase into the early practicing period and
the practicing subphase proper. During the former, the 10- to 11-month
infant becomes more and more deeply absorbed in his expanding mental
and physical universe. He begins rapidly to distinguish his own body from
his mother’s, to actively establish a specific (as opposed to symbiotic) bond
with her, and to indulge his autonomous, independent interests while in close
proximity to her. In a word, he begins to transfer his absorption in mother to
the world around him. He explores the objects in his vicinity—toys, bottles,
blankets—with his eyes, hands, and mouth; his growing locomotor capacity
widens his environment (p. 66). Yet in all of this, Mahler is careful to point
out, the mother is ‘‘still the center of the child’s universe.’’ His experience of
his ‘‘new world’’ is subtly ‘‘related’’ to her, and his excursions into the other-
than-mother realm are often followed by periods of intense clinging and a
refusal to separate. For an interval, the baby is absorbed in some external
object and seems oblivious to mother’s presence; a moment later he jumps
up and rushes to her side expressing his need for physical proximity
(pp. 66–67). Again and again he displays a desire for ‘‘emotional refueling,’’
38 Becoming God’s Children
The ‘‘symbiotic mothering half ’’ of the ‘‘self ’’ is ‘‘missed’’ during the very
subphase that is most obviously filled with the joys of separation (pp. 73–74).
The entire separation-individuation process culminates at approximately
30 months in what Mahler terms ‘‘the rapprochement subphase,’’ the period
during which the infant perceives with growing clarity and certainty that he
and mother are separate beings, that the old symbiosis and the narcissistic
gratifications (including omnipotence) that go with it are illusory, that he is
physically and psychically alone. Here is Mahler’s powerful description of this
watershed in a person’s life:
With the acquisition of primitive skills and perceptual cognitive faculties there
has been an increasingly clear differentiation, a separation, between the intra-
psychic representation of the object and the self-representation. At the very
height of mastery, toward the end of the practicing period, it had already begun
to dawn on the junior toddler that the world is not his oyster, that he must cope
with it more or less on his own, very often as a relatively helpless, small, and
separate individual, unable to command relief or assistance merely by feeling
the need for it or by giving voice to that need (omnipotence).
(p. 78)
We may note parenthetically at this juncture that the core of Christian doc-
trine and rite is designed to deny precisely this momentous event, and not
only deny it but bring about its reversal through just those mechanisms that
Mahler mentions here, namely, ‘‘mere feeling’’ (wishing) and ‘‘giving voice’’
(prayers and invocations). Needless to say, we will soon explore these denials
and reversals in great depth.
With the erosion of symbiosis, the ‘‘fear of losing the love of the object,’’
as opposed to losing the object, makes itself felt increasingly in the child
(pp. 78–79). Up to this point (the rapprochement subphase), the object
and the self have been more or less psychically indistinguishable. Now, as
differentiation occurs in earnest, the object’s love becomes the focus of the
child’s attention. This does not mean that the original anxiety over loss of
the object as a part of the self disappears. It means only that an additional,
more conscious or even cognitive anxiety has been superimposed upon
the original, primal dread. Accordingly, the toddler begins to demand the
mother’s constant attention. He is deeply preoccupied with her whereabouts.
He expresses enormous anger and anxiety at her leave-taking, and anguish at
being left behind. He clings to mother, seeks her lap, and may begin to show
a dependent interest in maternal substitutes. In a thousand ways he attempts
to coerce the mother into fulfilling his wishes. He tries at times to be magnifi-
cently separate, omnipotent, rejecting: he will gain the mother’s love and
40 Becoming God’s Children
mind ‘‘the presence of a reliable internal image that remains relatively stable
irrespective of the state of instinctual need or inner discomfort. On the basis
of this achievement, temporary separation can be lengthened and better
tolerated’’ (p. 110). This is the necessary step, the vital inward accomplish-
ment, that permits further growth, further individuation, and further ego
strength in the preschooler and eventually in the school child.
Mahler devotes the second half of her treatise to several lengthy case histor-
ies in which we see children struggling from normal autism and symbiosis to
separation and individuation. She strives in these sections to illustrate her
theoretical position at the clinical level, the level from which the theoretical
materials originally arose, of course. As she does this, Mahler makes clear
something that she stresses in many places in Chapter 3, Part One, namely,
that it is the combination of a particular caretaker interacting with a particu-
lar child that ultimately shapes the child’s emerging character in terms of both
conscious and unconscious processes. Projections pass not only from the baby
to the mother, but from the mother to the baby as well. ‘‘It seemed that the
ability to cope with separateness, as well as with actual physical separation,’’
declares Mahler,
section is the passing of the rapprochement crises, not the passing of the
separation-union conflict. Indeed, it is the position of this book, and has been
from the outset, that this conflict never ceases, that it so forcefully shapes
and directs our conduct as to gain a place among the central conflicts of our
experience as a form of life. As Mahler herself observes, a ‘‘sound image’’ of
the maternal figure does not mean that the old longing for merger stops, that
the fear of reengulfment goes away, that anxiety, ambivalence, and splitting
suddenly vanish, along with feelings of omnipotence and narcissistic grandi-
osity; it does not mean that the primal terrors of rejection and loss miracu-
lously disappear forever. The establishment of a sound maternal image
simply means that the little person can stumble ahead still loaded with the
great, absorbing issues of the early time, still loaded with the stress that
attends the erosion of symbiosis, still wishing contradictorily for both merger
and differentiation, and still smarting from the collapse of dual-unity
(p. 115). What occurs as the infant undergoes separation has been described
by Ana-Maria Rizzuto as a ‘‘life-long mourning process that triggers an
endless search for replacement.’’19 To express the matter from a different yet
crucially related angle, the passing of the rapprochement crisis simply means
that one is now in a position to act out among others this basic human
dilemma, this rooted, unconscious issue as it manifests itself projectively at
the levels of both individual and group conduct. It means that one can now
seek for omnipotence, fusion, and narcissistic gratification in the wider
world. In a manner of speaking, one is loose. The old cliché that we are all
more or less neurotic hopefully emerges with fresh clarity at this juncture.
The dynamic, shaping influence of implicit memory on the Christian reli-
gion may also emerge with fresh clarity here. As we peruse Mahler’s work and
come to appreciate the intensity and the complexity of the neonate’s initial
encounter with the world, we have the impression that the little one is passing
through a veritable lifetime of emotional and physical experience, a lifetime
of potent, interpersonal events. Yet the whole extended episode, incredibly,
is destined to go mnemonically underground, to discover a brain-based path-
way to the land of ‘‘infantile amnesia’’! Make no mistake, this is not because
babies can’t remember things. On the contrary, they have strong memorial
capacities almost from the outset. It is because ongoing mnemonic, neural
developments (mainly language), along with a host of emerging tasks and
requirements, come sharply to the fore as infancy gives way to childhood
and gradually relinquishes its hold upon the mind. As I have been suggesting
all along, we have in this remarkable situation the living seed of faith, of the
believer’s heartfelt conviction that his invisible, mysterious Parent-God is
there. Not only does the will to believe, to accept the veracity of Christian
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 43
The Mirror
The genesis and the formation of the self derive from the baby’s initial mir-
roring experience with the mother. For the past half-century this remarkable
aspect of our origins has been studied intensively and has come to be regarded
as a central feature of our development. The investigations of René Spitz
and his associates during the 1950s and 1960s established at the clinical level
the baby’s inclination to concentrate on the mother’s face—and in particular
on her eyes—during periods of feeding. For three, or perhaps four, months
the nursing infant does not look at the mother’s breast (or at the bottle held
close to her breast) but at her face. ‘‘From the moment the mother comes into
the room to the end of nursing he stares at her face.’’20 What is especially
interesting in this regard is the connection between such primal gazing and
the mouth, or ‘‘oral cavity.’’ While the child takes into his mouth and body
his physical nourishment, he takes into his dawning awareness or his ‘‘visceral
brain’’ the emotional, psychological materials that he discovers in the face,
eyes, and bodily attitude of the mother. It is often remarked that the first self
is a bodily self and that our later life is influenced at the perceptual level by
the foundational experiences our bodies undergo as consciousness awakens.
We have here a compelling instance of how this works. When Spitz calls the
oral cavity in its conjunction with the mother’s body ‘‘the cradle of human
perception,’’ he reminds us that sucking in and spitting out are the first, the
most basic, and the most persistent perceptual behaviors among humans.
They underlie at the bodily level our subsequent rejections and acceptances,
our subsequent negations and celebrations, of experience.
Although Spitz established the baby’s inclination to stare at the mother’s
face, notes H. M. Southwood,21 whose discussion I follow closely here, he
did not state that mother and infant spend considerable time looking at each
other, nor did he contend that such looking, along with the mother initiating
the infant’s facial expressions and sounds, provided the means for the baby to
regard the mother’s face and sounds as his own. An inborn tendency on the
part of the infant prompts him to seek out his mother’s gaze and to do so
44 Becoming God’s Children
regularly and for extended periods. The mother, because of tendencies devel-
oped during the course of her relationship with her own mother, sets about
exploiting this mutual face-gazing activity. As the eye-to-eye contact becomes
frequent, and easily observed by the investigator, the mother’s inclination to
continually change her facial expression, as well as the quality of her vocalizing,
emerges with striking clarity. Usually she smiles and nods and coos; sometimes
in response to an infant frown she frowns. In virtually every instance, the
mother’s facial and vocal behavior comprises an imitation of the baby’s. Thus,
as the mother descends to the infant’s level, she provides him with a particular
kind of human reflection. She does not simply give the baby back his own self;
she reinforces a portion of the baby’s behavior in comparison with another
portion. She gives the baby back not merely a part of what he is doing but
something of her own in addition. In individual development, ‘‘the precursor
of the mirror is the mother’s face.’’22 The upshot may be stated as follows:
the kind of behavior we connect with our perceptual nature derives in large
measure from the behavior of the mother. Not only does she trigger the per-
ceiving self’s formation, she determines the kind of stimuli to which the child
will attend, including the stimuli that will eventually come through language.
Our mental makeup, then, is shaped by those we internalize during the
early phases of our development. Our earliest interactional perceptions
become dynamic parts of our personality structure and continue to influence
us in all that we do long after the specific individuals who were the aim of our
internalizing tendency have ceased to be. By the time we have reached adult-
hood there exists within us an inner world, a kind of psychic universe that is
inhabited by the people that have entered us, or more properly, that we have
taken into ourselves along our maturational way. We live in two worlds, from
the beginning, and our perceptual life must be regarded as a function of the
interaction of these worlds that continually impinge upon one another.
I want to reemphasize here that the parent-child interactions of the early
period must not be viewed as primarily cognitive events. In the words of
Daniel N. Stern to whose The Interpersonal World of the Infant I now turn,
‘‘They mainly involve affect and excitement’’ and become part of the infant’s
effort ‘‘to order the world by seeking invariants.’’ When the preverbal, inward
Representation of such Interaction becomes Generalized into what Stern calls
a RIG, the infant’s ‘‘sense of a core self ’’ is well upon its developmental way.
‘‘Affects,’’ writes Stern, ‘‘are excellent self-variants because of their relative
fixity,’’ which means, of course, that affects are a central part of mirroring.
By creating a ‘‘continuity of experience,’’ and in particular a ‘‘continuity of
affective experience,’’ the RIG provides the baby with the psychic, emotional
foundation of his subsequent perceptual interactions with the world. 23
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 45
As I earlier noted, we see the world ‘‘feelingly.’’ Thus, mirroring in its early
stages (we’ll come to the later stages very soon) comprises for Stern a ‘‘mediation’’
in which the caregiver ‘‘greatly influences the infant’s sense of wonder and
avidity for exploration.’’ It is ‘‘only the feeling state’’ that belongs to
the nascent self, that is a ‘‘self-invariant,’’ and ‘‘merger experiences’’ become
simply ‘‘a way of being with someone.’’ The infant lays down over and over
again the memory of specific affective episodes; he or she develops RIGs;
and he or she becomes susceptible to subsequent experiences (the ‘‘spiritual’’
plane) that recall the foundational ones. Later affective exchanges reactivate
the original exchanges; they ‘‘pack the wallop of the original lived experience in
the form of an active memory.’’ This is the essence of the infant’s affective
world (pp. 103, 109–10).
Employing terminology that will help us enormously in understanding
Christian experience, Stern calls these active memories ‘‘evoked companions’’
and suggests that they constitute what psychology usually refers to as internal-
ized relationships. ‘‘For instance,’’ Stern writes in an effort to let us know
exactly what he has in mind,
Where else could all that affect come from?’’ Thus ‘‘attachment is the inter-
nalized representation of repetitive interactions with caregivers.’’ What is
internalized in the earliest representations ‘‘is not simply the infant’s own
action, nor the environments’ response, but the dynamic interplay between
the two.’’24 Can anyone fail to spy here the manner in which these citations
touch upon, indeed mesh with, our earlier discussion of separation anxiety
as presented in Mahler?
Many individual and group behaviors and beliefs, including those that
occur in the realm of Christianity, are designed unconsciously to address
the problem of separation (and/or other psychological problems) by offering
practitioners experiences that evoke companions. Such experiences grant the
solace of companionship to those who are struggling in the after-separation
world, those whose aloneness, self-alienation, or persistent separation anxiety
prime them to respond to an unseen universe of powerful forces and beings to
which they are ostensibly connected. Indeed, many of the figures at the heart
of Christian ritual (God the Father, the Son, Mary, and the Holy Spirit) may
be regarded as projective, psychological expressions, or complex, multilayered
symbolifications, of those longed-for inward companions associated origi-
nally with the dynamic affects included in the dual-unity situation, the baby’s
delicious, regulating, invariant, and internalized encounters with the caregiving
figures of the early period.
The Word
Eighty years ago, the pioneering investigations of the Russian linguist Lev
Vygotsky25 made clear that the development of language was not primarily
a cognitive process (the orthodox view) but an interactive, social process
loaded with emotional, bodily components from the preverbal period.
Because thought and speech develop in a parallel and reciprocal fashion, we
must ultimately think of language as a dynamic system of meaning in which
the emotional and the intellectual unite. The egocentric speech of the three-
year-old does not disappear when the child reaches seven or eight. Instead
of atrophying, such egocentric speech goes underground; that is, it turns into
inner speech and forms the foundation of that inward babble that, joined to
higher cognitive components, comes eventually to comprise a sizable portion
of our ordinary consciousness. In this way, the development of thinking is
not from the individual to the social but from the social to the individual.
The child starts conversing with himself as he has been doing with others.
As for the spoken word, it is initially a substitute for the gesture, for the
bodily attitude and bodily expression that precede the verbalized sound.
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 47
When the child says ‘‘mama,’’ it is not merely the word that means, say, put
me in the chair, but the child’s whole behavior at that moment, his reaching
out for the chair, trying to hold it, etc. In contrast to the egocentric speech
that goes inward, verbalized speech goes outward; the child uses it as
a method of pointing. It is the fusion of this inward speech and developing
outward speech that finally comprises human thought in its ordinary, basic
expression. We appreciate from this viewpoint the growing psychological
realization, based explicitly on Vygotsky’s work, that thinking is an uncon-
scious process in the first instance.26 Even our conscious speech, the psycho-
logical community has come to recognize, is pervaded by unconscious
mechanisms to the degree that it is tied to our thinking.
With regard to the role of separation in all of this, we must note that sym-
bol formation (or word formation) arises from the infant’s shared experience
with the mother. The common act of ‘‘referential pointing’’ starts with the
mother’s invitation but soon leads to the child inviting the mother to join
in the contemplation of some object. This marks the beginning of what psy-
chologists call ‘‘intellectual stereoscopy’’ in which the objectification of the
world is dependent on social interaction. The child names things to someone,
and the loving feedback he receives becomes the incentive for naming further
things. The whole idea of twoness and separateness arises from this mutuality.
Thus, the presence and absence of the mother and of important physical
objects in the child’s world play motivational roles in the development of rep-
resentational thought. In fact, the ability to recognize mother, to conceptual-
ize her as mother, is goaded into existence by the need to cope with her
absence, or loss. The feeling of loss becomes the motive for ‘‘acquiring the
capacity to represent absent objects or to represent objects regardless of their
presence or absence.’’ When the baby names the absent object, he predicates
it on the basis of its former presence: thus, mommy gone. The same act can
predicate a future presence on a current absence. The ideas of gone and
mommy are linked and placed in relation to one another. The whole business
of linguistic predication is thus associated with the problem of separation
from the caretaker. Again, as the child links up mommy and gone, he creates
a dependent relationship between two ideas that substitutes for each idea’s
dependency on actual experience. This gives the child the power to recall
the mother at will. Symbolic representation (as in play) comes to comprise
a way back to the missing object of one’s emotions.27
Because the verbal representation of the thing is the culmination of the
symbolic process, the word is the magical tie that reunites us with the all-
important figure(s) of infancy and childhood. It is not merely that maternal
stimulation during the time of language development is necessary for the
48 Becoming God’s Children
fulfillment of the child’s potential; our symbolic seeing is charged with the
emotional energy that went into our life and death struggle to maintain our
connection to the caregiver at the same time we were giving her up. Through
the early imperfections of mothering we learn to grip the world with our
bodies, with our tense anticipation (the time sense). Through the crises of
separation, which continue to transpire after the early period, we learn to grip
the world with our minds, with our symbols, with our words. The mirror
phase of infancy eventually gives way to the presentational mirror of a mind
that has separation on its mind. The very running on of our thoughts in
ordinary consciousness becomes a link to the figures of the past. To express
the matter in terms that recall the context of our discussion explicitly, because
the word becomes the child’s chief tool for ‘‘matching mental states,’’28 the
word also becomes the child’s chief tool for preserving the ‘‘companionship’’
from which his very selfhood arises. Thus, language as the means of
approaching God harbors perforce the unconscious aims and wishes
of the early period as they inform the supplications of the adult. In the
universe of religious behavior, the word always reaches back to its primitive
communicative origins.
our mind-brain trigger the primal inclination to make the universe in which
we abide interpersonal, too.
The ‘‘truth’’ of the Christian narrative with the loving Parent-God at the
center is confirmed implicitly, unconsciously through a primed, fully readied
‘‘attractor state’’ that resides at the foundation of the believer’s interpersonally
sculpted, interpersonally wired brain. He is not simply attracted to the reli-
gious narrative to which he is eventually exposed; the system is completely
dynamic: it is he who also attracts the narrative to himself, yanking it in,
absorbing it, mapping it onto the model, the scheme, upon which he’s been
relying all along. The attractor state within him is as eager for confirmation
of its core perception as those who offer the narrative to him are eager for
his acceptance of it and his entry into the flock.
It is not only Christianity, needless to say, but a wide variety of human par-
ticipations that are linked firmly to the basic biological situation: our ongoing
interpersonal relationships at both the individual and group level (spouse and
family); our national loyalty and identification with ‘‘motherland’’ and
‘‘fatherland,’’ including the ‘‘leader’’ or ‘‘chief ’’; our absorption in music,
art, literature; and, of course, our inclination to make gods out of other insti-
tutions such as science or philosophy. However, because the Christian
domain is imponderable, invisible, entirely unsupported by what we term
empirical criteria, because for millions of people everywhere mental and emo-
tional stability depend significantly on their Christian ties, and finally because
Christianity must compete with other emergent systems and brain states that
come into play as an individual develops over time, Christianity’s humble,
worldly task is to reinforce, to strengthen, to deepen the participant’s original,
brain-based convictions through steady, even continuous exposure to ritual
and to word from early childhood onward. The neurons that fired together
and wired together to create the primal attractor state during the early period
must be regularly activated in the proper devotional context to ensure the
continuation of the supernatural attachment that emerged on initial exposure
to official, sacred narrative. To put it another way, the worldly task of institu-
tional Christianity is to provide the flock with the inspiration to continue its
mapping of the primal, core experience of attachment to the parental figure
onto the orthodox version of the substitute Parent-God. Unless this happens,
both flock and earthly shepherds are apt to disappear. Accordingly, to employ
a familiar example in illustration, when we hear the gospel choir on TV sing-
ing, ‘‘Jesus came and found me/And put His arms around me,’’ we detect the
primal attractor state of union with the biological caregiver humming along
quietly beneath the mapped-on surface expression of the core fantasy. Surely
we begin to spy, now, the full emotive source of Winifred Gallagher’s observa-
tion that ‘‘mother and offspring live in a biological state that has much in
common with addiction. When they are parted, the infant does not just miss
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 53
refers to the general inability of people to remember specific events from the
early years of their lives. On the basis of both free recall studies (What is your
earliest memory?) and studies for memories of notable and datable early events
(the birth of a sibling, hospitalization, the Kennedy assassination) psychologists
have concluded that there are very few memories from before the age three
years. The average age of the earliest memory reported is three-and-a-half, with
a small but consistent gender difference indicating that females reported earlier
memories.
If people are asked to recall episodes from the entire life span the number
reported before age eight falls off sharply in comparison to other periods. This
indicates that it is not the age of the memories per se that accounts for their rel-
ative paucity, rather it is the life period that they occur within (the earliest years)
that is sparsely represented in long term autobiographical memory.35
cradles the dying Jesus in her arms). We perceive the endless affective cues in
an endless variety of ritual contexts (let us kneel in our helplessness before our
Almighty Creator); the memories contained in emotions and behaviors (your
Heavenly Father loves you; bow your heads humbly in recognition of His
blessings, in gratitude for your daily bread, which He provides); the learned
routines that come to comprise a sizable portion of one’s Christian religious
life (the ceremonies of the service, the holiday celebrations, and the garb);
the generalized past experiences not linked to specific events (this accident is
tragic, but we cannot fathom fully the ways of our loving God [anymore than
we could fathom what our parents were doing early on]); the access through
reinstatement (let us open our Bibles once again and read of His wondrous
works). One might continue in a similar vein forever. Indeed, even those
aspects of Christianity about which we ‘‘think’’ discursively, even those aspects
that are intentional, conscious, accessed in response to social demand, are
themselves based ultimately upon our early experience, our early, internal-
ized, unconscious associations that give such ‘‘higher’’ aspects their compel-
ling, affective power, their emotional bite as it were. When we ‘‘sin,’’ for
example, we undergo separation from our Lord, Who is unconsciously linked
to the caregiver; we experience once more the threat (and the torment) of pri-
mal, foundational loss, what Dante calls in Inferno, ‘‘the eternal isolation of
the soul.’’ When we love others as ourselves in response to Christ’s directive,
we bring to others that primal, foundational love we internalized in response
to the timely ministrations of our parental provider. Our ‘‘conscience’’ as we
feel it in wrongdoing, and as we express it in our compassionate concern for
the welfare of others, is rooted in our deepest affective core, in the part of
us that we informally call ‘‘the heart,’’ that wordless region from which comes
the expression of our basic emotional nature, shaped in the first years of life.
As for the issue of why the early period is lost to our explicit recollection,
there is no universally accepted, definitive answer because the question (for
obvious reasons) does not easily lend itself to empiric, observational investi-
gation. Generally accepted and ubiquitous in the literature, however, is the
notion that what we have called the nonverbal, image-based system becomes
increasingly unavailable to direct apprehension as it simply gives way to
the emergent, brain-based modes of recollection linked to the socially acces-
sible system. As we mature neurologically, the later configuration is the one
we are fated to use when we employ our will and our capacity to remember.
The answer that reigns in the literature, then, is Piagetian: an early ‘‘scheme’’
of cerebral functioning gradually yields to, and is finally absorbed into, a later
‘‘scheme.’’ As Johnston expresses the matter, ‘‘The inaccessibility of early
childhood memories [is] due to a disjunction between the earliest and later
56 Becoming God’s Children
Tessler studied 3 year olds and their mothers on a visit to a natural history
museum. She found that none of the children remembered any of the objects
that they viewed in the museum if they had not talked about them with their
mothers. Mother’s talk alone was not facilitative, nor was a child’s mention
alone effective in leading to subsequent remembering. Creating a narrative
together cemented particular objects in memory.
And then, summarizing the matter for us neatly, Johnston writes, ‘‘Through
sharing memories with others language becomes available as a means of
reinstating memory’’ (p. 4). Johnston calls this the ‘‘Vygotskian model’’ refer-
ring to the famous Russian linguist, Vygotsky, whose work we explored a few
pages earlier. The point is, the two major narratives, or stories, that come to
comprise the ‘‘world’’ or the ‘‘universe’’ of the developing person, namely,
the familial narrative and the religious narrative, are destined to inherit, to
contain, to absorb, and to harbor, precisely the early, preverbal experience
that resides at the core of that person’s mind-brain. The affect, the perception,
the attachments and longings of the early period as they are steadily internal-
ized during life’s first years, become the human ‘‘stuff ’’ out of which the reli-
gious realm is fashioned and toward which religious practice is finally
directed. ‘‘If the infant’s environment provides frequent opportunities for
reactivation,’’ notes Johnston, ‘‘then theoretically an individual’s early
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 57
experiences could be remembered over a lifetime’’ (p. 3). Memory turns out
to be an ‘‘emergent property’’ of the ‘‘cue and the engram’’ (p. 3), and it is
precisely the ‘‘engram’’ of the first relationship, or what we have called the
attractor state as grounded in the basic biological situation, at which Chris-
tianity aims its traditional or sacred ‘‘cues,’’ the substance of its doctrinal
and ritualistic enactments.
We must ask ourselves, what is there in the young person’s mind-brain after
all to accede with emotion to Christianity’s ‘‘story,’’ to the narrative with the
loving Parent-God at its center, if not the immediate context of the young
person’s life? Clearly, there is nothing else. Equally, as the familial narrative
takes shape and the young person increasingly apprehends the inevitable psy-
chic (if not physical) separation that looms as its culmination, the Christian
narrative begins to assume a central, affective position in the psychic
economy of the developing individual. While he must relinquish eventually
the actual parent, he can retain forever the mysterious Parent-God, the super-
natural surrogate whose attractive power emanates unconsciously from that
very mnemonic place from which the attachment to the actual parent initially
arose. As he becomes a predominantly verbal, narrative creature as opposed to
a ‘‘primitive,’’ preverbal creature, lo and behold, there is his religious narrative
to greet him, to offer him another loving, protective Parent, another Guide,
another Nourisher, another Omnipotent Companion and Ally Whose hand
he may clutch as he proceeds upon his increasingly separate way. At the affec-
tive, perceptual, synaptic level of his existence the Christian narrative presents
itself as another version of and the direct successor to exactly what he has just
experienced interactionally as a little one; and it derives its compelling power,
its compelling timeless appeal, from precisely the direction of his implicit
recollection: he can’t see the realistic, empirical link between the two stages,
the two systems; all he can do is feel the connection inside; the unconscious
associations impel him to judge the religious narrative as ‘‘true.’’ In other
words, the narrative implicitly confirms what he’s just experienced as a person;
it returns him to his familiar internalized reality at his emergent verbal level
of understanding, and this fills him with the irresistible sensation that he is
what he is, that no break exists in his being, that no separation will snatch
him away from his inward emotional reality, or world. In the neurobiological
terms that recall the early stages of our discussion, the Christian narrative
permits him to map his early experience onto his ongoing and increasingly
separate life. Reason, needless to say, is not there yet to question the assump-
tions of his supernatural outlook. He simply projects his way happily to the
spiritual universe that is offered to him by his directional elders. Where the
arms of the actual biological caregiver held him in the beginning, the arms
58 Becoming God’s Children
of sweet Jesus hold him now. As the fleshly body of the mother recedes, the
spiritual body of the Deity appears mentally to take her place. The believer will
not be alone. With the help of society’s institutional promptings, and with
the assistance of his capacities to imagine, to play, to create substitutes for the
treasured caregiver he must gradually relinquish as he grows, his mind-brain
will accord him just what his mind-brain requires for his peace of mind.
The religious story to which Christians are introduced as the early, prever-
bal stage gives way to the narrative style of perception is all-encompassing,
all-satisfying, completely reassuring—that is, if they stick to the rules and
dutifully propitiate their Parental Provider. They are allied with omnipotence
once again; the all-powerful parent returns in the form of the Parent-God.
They will live forever, be loved forever, be guided forever, be ‘‘housed’’ forever
in the mansions of their benign, supernatural Benefactor, their Shepherd,
their Savior and Spiritual Nourisher. All their questions will be answered;
all their wonderings about the nature of Nature will be met with some sort
of explanation, thus allaying anxiety over the shape of the unknown. Their
religious narrative has, like all good dramatic tales, a beginning, a middle,
and an end. They discover their provenance, their duties in mortal life, and
their destination upon mortal life’s conclusion. They can continue to ques-
tion and to wonder as much as they like, of course, but they don’t have to
wonder and question; they can rest content in the reassurances of doctrine
whenever they wish to do so. All who seek shall find. All who submit shall
be comforted. All who kneel to their loving Parent-God shall be uplifted, over
and over again, each time they supplicate, forever more.
Magic
Anthropological attempts to fathom magical behavior commenced in ear-
nest during the course of the nineteenth century and culminated in Sir James
G. Frazer’s monumental study, The Golden Bough, originally published in
England in 1890. The century as a whole was given to what we may regard as
an ‘‘us and them’’ approach to things, an approach that crept unhindered into
many fields of intellectual endeavor, including anthropology and comparative
religion. Over here were enlightened, contemporary, Christianized Europeans
of good social and economic standing, and over there were pagans and
primitives past and present, prone to quaint, crude, formulaic attempts
at controlling a world they didn’t understand scientifically (an exception
was sometimes made for the ancient Hebrews, one of whom was, after all,
Jesus Christ). Primitive magic was goal directed (or ‘‘efficacious’’) supersti-
tion; it was tied to power-charged objects and spells wielded by all manner
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 59
Sacramental efficacy works internally; magical efficacy works externally. But this
difference, even at the theological level, is less great than it seems. For if the the-
ologian remembers to take account of the doctrine of the Incarnation, magical
60 Becoming God’s Children
enough in itself, and the even more magical doctrine of the Resurrection and of
how its power is channeled through the sacraments, he cannot make such a tidy
distinction between sacramental and magical efficacy. Then there is the popular
magicality of Christianity. A candle lit to St. Anthony for finding a lost object is
magical, as is also a St. Christopher medal used to prevent accidents . . . Both
sacramental and magical behavior are expressions of ritualism.
And finally, ‘‘I see no advantage . . . in making any distinction between magi-
cal and sacramental’’ (pp. 8–9).
Douglas renders the matter even more succinctly perhaps in her Purity and
Danger: ‘‘The division between religion and magic’’ is ‘‘ill-considered.’’
Indeed, ‘‘the more intractable puzzles in comparative religion arise because
human experience has been thus wrongly divided.’’39 Such passages not only
go to the heart of the matter, they allow us to witness firsthand the kind
of professional insight that has prompted The HarperCollins Dictionary of
Religion to present magic and religion as ultimately ‘‘compatible’’ for
‘‘twentieth-century scholars,’’ or the Penguin Dictionary of Religions to declare
that ‘‘magic shades off into religion,’’ or The Oxford Dictionary of World
Religions to assert that for present-day anthropologists magic is ‘‘embedded
in religion’’ where it ‘‘acts as an organization of context and meaning,’’
or the Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions to view the notion
that magic and religion are integrally related as a twentieth-century common-
place.40 Here are John S. and David Boyer Noss summing things up for us
temperately in A History of the World’s Religions:
Does this imply that magic may be covertly present in prayer, where
the emphasis is placed on asking rather than forcing? I believe that it does,
as I will soon try to establish. As for the us-them thinking that characterized
Victorian approaches to magic and religion, it has bequeathed to us, once
again in Mary Douglas’s words, ‘‘a false distinction between primitive and
modern cultures.’’ It is a ‘‘mistake to suppose that there can be religion which
is all interior, with no rules, no liturgy, no external signs of inward states. As with
society, so with religion, external form is the condition of its existence.’’
The proper model for appreciating ‘‘primitive ritual,’’ observes Douglas, is
not ‘‘the absurd Ali Baba’’ but the modern psychologist. It is modern
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 61
psychology precisely that can provide us with ‘‘pertinent suggestions’’ for the
understanding of ‘‘religious beliefs.’’42 Surely the great French anthropologist
Marcel Mauss was thinking along similar lines when, several decades before
the appearance of Professor Douglas’s writings, he declared in A General
Theory of Magic, ‘‘In magic, as in religion, it is the unconscious ideas that
are the active ones.’’43 Accordingly, the old us-them dichotomy must be
retired from active service lest it wreak still more havoc on our comprehen-
sion of human behavior. Let’s give Susanne K. Langer the last word on the
subject: ‘‘Once we recognize a truly primitive trait of human experience in a
naı̈ve form, we usually end up by finding it still operative in our own subjec-
tive experience.’’44 We have far too much history behind us as millennial
Westerners to doubt the veracity of that sentence.
Frazer provides us with a useful, preliminary framework in The Golden
Bough: ‘‘Magic rests everywhere,’’ he remarks, ‘‘on two fundamental princi-
ples: first, that like produces like, effect resembling cause; second, that things
which have once been in contact continue ever afterwards to act on each other.’’
The ‘‘former principle’’ is tied to homeopathic or imitative magic, the ‘‘latter’’
to the contagious variety.45 Let’s open with contagion, ‘‘the most familiar
example’’ of which is the ‘‘magical sympathy’’ that is ‘‘supposed to exist
between man and any severed portion of his person, such as his hair or nails;
so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may work his will, at
any distance, upon the person from whom they were cut.’’ Frazer goes on:
ultimately appear in human thought and culture. Who has removed the mists
of time, looked into the distant past, and seen? For Durkheim, religion is
there; it is a reality one discovers on the planet, either directly as one travels
about, or indirectly as one reads and ponders. Having discovered it, what
one finds in turn (Durkheim concentrated on primitive cultures) is that reli-
gion is made up of rites and observances designed to propitiate the gods and
thus gain their support, that specific rites and observances are delegated to
specific members of the community, that deities themselves have fixed,
explicit functions to perform, and that religion exists primarily for the benefit
of the social order and not for addressing the spiritual needs of the individual.
In this way, a society’s ‘‘spiritual beings’’ turn out to be an integral facet of
the overall system. ‘‘The religious,’’ maintains Durkheim, is identical with
‘‘the social.’’ For ‘‘in a general way . . . a society has all that is necessary to
arouse the sensation of the Divine in minds, merely by the power that it has
over them; to its members it is what a God is to its worshippers’’ (p. 206).
We immediately appreciate, of course, the accuracy of all this. Anyone who
has been raised in a religious home, a religious tradition, or who has simply
read and digested feelingly the work of Honoré de Balzac, or James Joyce,
or Bernard Malamud knows very well the extent to which religious beliefs
and customs can determine a person’s existence. The person of religion as a
directive, social force is undeniable. Yet surely the psychology of the individ-
ual plays a crucial, causal role in the total picture. To make God equal society
or society equal God finally raises more questions than it answers. Observes
Bronislaw Malinowski: ‘‘The social share in religious enactment is a condi-
tion necessary but not sufficient . . . Without the analysis of the individual
mind, we cannot take one step in the understanding of religion.’’50 Thus
the problem arises, how do we go about bringing the ‘‘individual mind’’ to
Durkheim’s social analysis? How are we to understand from an individual
perspective that society’s ‘‘power over its members’’ is ‘‘what a God is to its
worshippers?’’
The best way is to concentrate not upon society as we usually think of it
but upon the first society, the first social order the individual encounters,
the first social reality he is obliged to negotiate, the first ‘‘fixed relation’’
he confronts during the course of his days. To express it as unoriginally as
possible, we must begin at the beginning—and I don’t mean at the beginning
of the individual’s career as opposed to the individual’s societal enactments
precisely because the distinction is otiose: we are social to the root; our
individual and our social experiences are inextricably connected. The dyadic
circularity of the infant-mother bond is the individual-social matrix of our
bodily-emotional-psychological lives. Of overriding significance here is the
64 Becoming God’s Children
why we tend generally to obey the rules, or to rebel in a fashion that will not
result in ostracism, in the temporary or permanent loss of everyone and
everything. Let’s recall now Professor Durkheim’s contention: ‘‘The power
of society over its members’’ is ‘‘what a God is to its worshippers.’’ The social
and the religious go together because religious society inherits the first society,
or function, as continuation of the initial social bond. The asking and the
receiving that we do in Christian prayer is but a small specific instance of
the way in which our early biosocial situation moves toward the wide social
world, its providential successor.
Winnicott’s famous discussion of ‘‘transitional objects’’ (the blankie, the
teddy, and the Raggedy Ann) illustrates very well the process of cultural
succession. Confronted with the closing stages of symbiosis, the newcomer
(20–36 months) gravitates creatively and trustingly toward the ‘‘potential
space’’ of the ‘‘intermediate area.’’ He lessens his emerging oneness by engag-
ing in illusory twoness. He mitigates the terror of separate, individual exis-
tence by constructing an intimate relationship with a symbolic companion,
or ally. He plays it both ways. He strikes out on his own, and he returns
imaginatively to the kind of psychic fusion to which he’s been accustomed.
‘‘With human beings,’’ states Winnicott, ‘‘there can be no separation, only a
threat of separation; and the threat is maximally or minimally traumatic
according to the experience of the first separatings.’’ However, ‘‘at the same
time,’’ Winnicott goes on, one can suggest that ‘‘separation is avoided
by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of
symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to cultural life.’’52 The upshot
is clear.
Transitional objects are magical objects designed to control and to alter
reality in keeping with the wishes and needs of their youthful, omnipotent
creator. They have a practical magical purpose that is open, transparent. They
serve as symbolic substitutes for the relinquished parent, as transferential
entities that point motivationally toward the major symbolic, cultural substi-
tute for the receding parental figure, namely, the godhead. When Roheim
characterizes ‘‘the wife who replaces the mother’’ as civilizations’ chief substi-
tute object, he errs. Not only does he leave one-half of the human species out
of the equation, but he fails to appreciate the lengthy period that intervenes
between the relinquishment of the caregiver and the begetting of a spouse.
Not for everyone, of course, but for millions of Christians, it is the Deity
Who takes over the transitional realm; it is the Deity Who instrumentally
replaces the early, illusory, magical creations and Who provides the believer
with the inward security he craves as he assumes his separate existence in
the world. From exactly this angle we begin to appreciate in earnest the extent
66 Becoming God’s Children
Magic originates from the child’s crying when he is abandoned and angry; it is
not merely the expression of what actually takes places in the dual-unity situa-
tion, but is also a withdrawal of attachment from the object to the means by
which the object is wooed, that is, from the mother of the word and back again
to the mother.
(p. 12)
Notes
1. As I have already stated, I will be using the King James Version of the Bible
throughout this book.
2. Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, vol. I (New York: Springer,
1962), p. 6.
The Developmental Context: Psychology, Neurology, and Magic 69
3. The term ‘‘object’’ is used customarily in psychology because the infant has yet
to perceive the caregiver, usually the mother, as a separate, full-fledged person in the
way we normally intend the term. Object is an attempt to render the phenomenology
of the infant’s perception.
4. David L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, the Past
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 5.
5. Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal
Experience (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), p. 1.
6. Schacter. Searching for Memory, p. 174.
7. Siegel. The Developing Mind, pp. 24, 29, 30.
8. Michael S. Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain (New York: Dana Press, 2005),
p. 134.
9. Erik H. Erickson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964),
p. 153.
10. ———. Young Man Luther (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), p. 264.
11. See Joan W. Anderson, Where Angels Walk (New York: Ballantine Books,
2003).
12. Gary Whitmer, ‘‘On the Nature of Dissociation,’’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly 70
(2001): 807.
13. As noted in Chapter 1, ‘‘good enough mothering’’ is D. W. Winnicott’s termi-
nology. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 12.
14. Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Conscious-
ness (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
15. See Otto Rank, Psychology and the Soul, trans. W. Turner (New York:
A. S. Barnes, 1950).
16. Ethel S. Person, Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic
Passion (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 132.
17. Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of
the Human Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
18. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 13.
19. Ana-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979), p. 49.
20. René Spitz, The First Relationship (New York: International Universities Press,
1965), p. 81.
21. H. M. Southwood, ‘‘The Origin of Self-Awareness,’’ International Journal of
Psychoanalysis 66 (1973): 235–39.
22. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 22.
23. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books,
1985), pp. 74–75, 90–93.
24. Robert Rogers, Self and Other (New York: New York University Press, 1991),
p. 41.
25. Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1934, trans. E. Hanfman and G. Vakar
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979).
70 Becoming God’s Children
49. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. J. Swain
(Boston: Allen and Unwin, [1912] 1976).
50. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion (New York: Anchor Books,
1954), p. 69.
51. Géza Róheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (New York: Doubleday,
1971), pp. 122, 131.
52. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, pp. 108–109.
53. Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, p. 79.
54. Géza Róheim, Magic and Schizophrenia (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1955), p. 11.
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CHAPTER
PART ONE
3
The Infantilizing Process
Baptism
Baptism is ‘‘the basis of the whole Christian life’’1 because baptism restores
the worshiper to a version of the early period wherein he or she is once again
a ‘‘little child’’ in the care of a loving, omnipotent protector and provider.
Within this basic ritualistic framework the whole of Christian doctrine and
practice will transpire because Christian doctrine and practice attain their
full, magical potential only upon the mnemonic background or ‘‘screen’’ of
life’s initial stages. For the promise of salvation to ring true and thus arouse
the Holy Spirit, the bond with Christ must implicitly recall at the level of
state-dependent memory the bond with the biological caregiver, the ultimate,
tangible source of the Christian’s ‘‘spiritual’’ convictions. ‘‘You can be born
again,’’ cries the Reverend Robert H. Schuller; you can become ‘‘a child of
God. . . . Heaven is for real.’’2 And then, in another place, mixing the biologi-
cal with the ‘‘spiritual’’ in an attempt to explain this, Schuller writes, ‘‘The old
negative blood is drawn out’’ and ‘‘the new spirit of Jesus Christ [the Holy
Spirit], like new blood, flows through your entire nervous and emotional
system’’ (p. 156). This is ‘‘what God can do inside your mind,’’ asserts Schuller
(p. 156), which is to say, this is what worshipers can do inside their own minds
when they unite implicit memory with magical belief and practice.
As one receives the Holy Spirit through baptismal rite, declares Neil T.
Anderson, ‘‘he puts on a whole new nature and gets to go to heaven.’’3
He becomes ‘‘a child born of God’’ (p. 9) and also ‘‘a saint’’ (p. 12). His ‘‘identity’’
is no longer determined by his ‘‘physical heritage.’’ How he ‘‘formerly identi-
fied himself no longer applies.’’ For now, ‘‘Christ is all’’ (p. 9). One ‘‘learns to
walk again not by sight this time but by faith’’ (p. 145). We ‘‘fix our eyes on
Jesus’’ as we ‘‘learn to walk,’’ states Anderson, calling vividly to mind the man-
ner in which one learns to walk in the initial biological instance. Before one is
74 Becoming God’s Children
Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children,
ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.6
(Matt. 18:3)
I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against
her mother. . . . He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
of me; and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
(Matt. 10:35, 37)
Clearly, Jesus intends to take the parent’s place in the worshiper’s life, and He
intends to transform the worshiper into His own little child and a member of
His extended family of followers. For this and only this will trigger the psy-
chology essential to the successful working of the salvational scheme that is
Christianity itself. Just as the potential Christian merged with the biological
caregivers early on, so will Christ’s ‘‘convert’’ merge with the almighty
The Infantilizing Process 75
Parent-God whose loving, salvational presence will reverberate all the way
down to the level of implicit, state-dependent memory where the biological
caregiver mnemonically resides. The magical ‘‘mystery,’’ or ‘‘trick,’’ of the reli-
gious substitution is facilitated by the convert’s infantile amnesia: he can’t
recall the early period explicitly and thus can’t see what is actually occurring
as he undergoes his ‘‘conversion’’ and apprehends the appearance of the
putative Holy Spirit, the enigmatic Spirit-Person whose entrance into the
magical procedure ostensibly confirms its veracity. Accordingly, baptism is
not a single, solitary ceremony one undergoes along the way, often toward
the beginning of his earthly existence. It is an inward, psychological process
one is undergoing all the time as one becomes and continues to be the ‘‘little
child’’ of the Redeemer. ‘‘We are baptized but once,’’ writes G. P. Fisher in his
A History of Christian Doctrine,
yet the act is in the fullest sense eschatological: it sets its seal on our whole life,
which is ‘‘nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and constantly lived
in,’’ nor do we ‘‘perfectly fulfill the sign of baptism until the last day.’’ Baptism
is indeed for Luther the ‘‘outward and visible sign’’ of his whole doctrine of
justification.7
Infantile baptism, holds the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘‘is certainly
valid and efficacious,’’ but ‘‘Christian initiation remains incomplete.’’ It is
‘‘confirmation’’ at ‘‘maturity’’ that leads the Christian ‘‘to a more intimate
union with Christ,’’ that ‘‘imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark,
the ‘character’ which is the sign that Jesus Christ has marked a Christian with
the seal of His Spirit [the Holy Spirit] by clothing him with power from on
high.’’ 8 Thus, confirmation ‘‘unites us more firmly with Christ’’ as our
‘‘maturity’’ goes forward; ‘‘increases the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us[;] . . .
roots us more deeply in the divine filiation which makes us cry, Abba,
Father!’’ (p. 330). Surely the upshot is perfectly apparent: baptism’s aim is
to position the Christian in filial union with his Parent-God, his ‘‘Abba,’’
his ‘‘Father,’’ to make sure this inward conception, this inward apprehension,
this ‘‘seal,’’ is present to the worshiper on a daily basis, all the time, so that the
worshiper might feel all the time the working of the ‘‘Spirit’’ within him,
which means from the psychological/neurological angle the persistent
implicit recollection of the biological person (the Holy Spirit is doctrinally
a person) who ensured his security as a vulnerable, helpless, biological organism
during the course of his early days. Baptism is ‘‘the basis of the whole Christian
life’’ because the basic biological situation (which baptism recreates) is the
foundation of our natural life from which and only from which the power of
Christianity as a religion derives.
76 Becoming God’s Children
The great evangelistical mystic, Johann Arndt, constantly emphasized the truth
that: ‘‘without prayer we cannot find God; prayer is the means by which we seek
and find Him.’’ Schleiermacher, the restorer of evangelical theology in the
The Infantilizing Process 77
The upshot is clear: to get at the essence of Christian prayer is to get at the
essence of Christian faith; to get at the essence of Christian faith is to get at
the essence of the Christian religion.
Personal, individual, informal prayer, as opposed to codified, congrega-
tional prayer, is my main interest. This opposition, as it turns out, has a com-
plex, disputatious history that is not our business here. It is enough to say that
the individualism of prayer is usually traced back to Jeremiah and the Psalms
of the Old Testament, that Jesus’s prayer on the mount is widely regarded as
the model prayer for individual Christians (‘‘Not my will but Thine be
done’’);11 that Paul views personal, intercessory prayer as a cornerstone of
spiritual practice; and that by Luther’s day subjective, solitary prayer in which
the worshiper gives himself over to a fervent, one-to-one relationship with his
God is moving steadily toward the heart of Christianity, first for the Protes-
tant, and then, with rather less momentum perhaps, for the Catholic as well.
Accordingly, what follows will find us exploring from our particular theoreti-
cal angle the motivational dynamics of personal prayer in the Judeo-Christian
tradition.
I rely upon a wide variety of sources, but for much of the discussion
I utilize three pivotal, relatively recent treatments of the subject, namely,
Heiler’s Prayer, regarded by Hans Küng as the classical work on the topic
and perhaps the most scholarly and comprehensive book on prayer ever
to appear in the West; Ole Hallesby’s Prayer, another classic, translated into
several languages, reprinted 15 times in English alone, and probably the most
widely read and influential Protestant discussion composed during the twen-
tieth century; and Romano Guardini’s Prayer in Practice, a treasured work
among Roman Catholics and penned by one of the Church’s most astute
and respected thinkers—undoubtedly another classic treatment. Needless to
say, for all three of these authors, prayer and faith are integrally connected:
faith depends upon prayer for its existence, and prayer is nothing other than
faith’s signal manifestation. ‘‘We must bear in mind,’’ declares Guardini, ‘‘that
faith itself depends on prayer. . . . Prayer is the basic act of faith as breathing is
the basic act of life.’’12 Until we pray, maintains Hallesby, we have no access
78 Becoming God’s Children
to God, and God has no access to us: ‘‘He cannot gain admittance. To pray is
to believe.’’13 Faith is ‘‘prayer and nothing but prayer,’’ writes Heiler, echoing
Martin Luther, as we’ve just seen; without prayer, ‘‘we cannot find God’’
(p. xiii). The issue could hardly be plainer.
As we demonstrated at length in Chapter 2, the basic biological situation
of parent-child interaction is centrally concerned with asking and receiving.
Over and over again, thousands upon thousands of times, for years, the little
one calls upon the big one for sustenance and support, and the big
one responds. As I’ve stated, one would be hard-pressed to discover within
the realm of nature another example of physiological and emotional con-
ditioning to compare with this one in both depth and duration. As the
parent-child relationship deepens and develops, it is steadily, unremittingly
internalized by the growing youngster, not in some vague, metaphorical
way, mind you, but emotively, affectively, organically, even neurally until it
becomes the foundation of his budding perceptual existence. The caregiver
is taken psychically inside and set up as an internal presence that is integrally
connected to, indeed that is inseparable from, the emerging self. The early
interaction is imprinted on the brain.
That the Judeo-Christian tradition of individual subjective prayer is
ultimately petitionary in nature, in other words, that asking the Parent-God
for help and loving support resides at its theological core, is indisputable.
‘‘The heart of all prayer is petition,’’ states Heiler in one place (p. 17); and in
another, ‘‘The free spontaneous petitionary prayer of the natural man exhibits
the prototype of all prayer’’ (p. 1). ‘‘Whether we like it or not,’’ declares
C. H. Spurgeon, ‘‘asking is the rule of the Kingdom.’’14 ‘‘Petition is the heart
of prayer,’’ writes Patrick Cotter.15 Prayer is a ‘‘reverent petition to God,’’
asserts James Pruitt.16 The Judeo-Christian tradition of prayer, derived from
both the Old and New Testaments, has always been ‘‘essentially petitionary,’’
observes Walter A. Elwell in the Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology.17
Prayer is a ‘‘palpable thirst to ask,’’ maintains Timothy Jones in The Art of
Prayer.18 ‘‘Prayer’’ is a ‘‘trustful appeal for aid in our necessity,’’ holds the great
sixteenth-century theologian Huldrych Zwingli.19 ‘‘Give us this day our daily
bread,’’ requests the Lord’s Prayer. One could cite a thousand similar passages.
As for asking and receiving, we have the following: ‘‘One has only to ask the
Father in order to receive what is needed,’’ states Elwell, echoing Scripture.20
‘‘Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive,’’ writes
Hallesby, quoting Matthew 21:22.21 ‘‘Petition’’ for ‘‘divine grace’’ is ‘‘freely
bestowed,’’ observes Heiler (p. 243). ‘‘God’s power’’ is ‘‘capable of giving
everything,’’ maintains Guardini.22 ‘‘Asking is our staple diet,’’ asserts Gordon
Lindsay; ‘‘the spirit suffers when it is not fed the Bread of Life.’’23 ‘‘Prayer is
The Infantilizing Process 79
the spiritual practice of asking God for what you want and accepting that it
has been done once you have made the request,’’ suggests Joshua David Stone
in Soul Psychology; ‘‘God hears and answers all prayers.’’24 ‘‘Do you know why
the mighty God of the universe chooses to answer prayers?’’ inquires Richard
S. Foster. ‘‘It is because His children ask.’’25 ‘‘Everything will be given to
you,’’ declares Cotter in How to Pray; you are merely claiming ‘‘what is already
yours.’’26 Our asking is itself ‘‘God’s answering,’’ holds Jones.27 The classical
expression on the asking side has already been given, of course: ‘‘Give us this
day our daily bread.’’ On the receiving side we have, from Psalm 23, ‘‘The Lord
is my shepherd; I shall not want’’ (vv. 1–2). Taken together, these two lines
contain the pith of the petitionary mind-set.
My aim here, needless to say, is to establish a clear motivational link
between the immediate context of supplicatory ritual and the basic biological
situation of asking and receiving as earlier described. With such an aim in
view, we must inquire, first, how does one go about this individual subjective
praying, this asking the Parent-God for succor and support? Second, do the
instructions for prayer proffered by the authoritative theologians call to
mind explicitly the early parent-child interaction, the interaction in which
the helpless, dependent little one calls upon the all-powerful provider for
nourishment, attention, love, and care?
To pray successfully, one must adopt a certain attitude, a certain psycho-
logical posture, or stance. One does not come to God in just any way but
in a very specific way indeed. I’m referring to an attitude of utter dependency,
utter helplessness, utter submission, a willful attempt to get rid of one’s will
entirely. ‘‘Helplessness,’’ writes Hallesby, ‘‘is unquestionably the first and surest
indication of a praying heart. As far as I can see, prayer has been ordained only
for the helpless’’ (p. 13). Hallesby goes on in the personal style that has made
his book so influential:
Listen, my friend! Your helplessness is your best prayer. It calls from your heart to
the heart of God with greater effect than all your uttered pleas. He hears it from
the very moment that you are seized with helplessness, and He becomes actively
engaged at once in hearing and answering the prayer of your helplessness.
Thus ‘‘helplessness is the real secret and impelling power of prayer,’’ the ‘‘very
essence of prayer,’’ the ‘‘decisive factor’’ that makes us ‘‘attached to God’’ and
‘‘more strongly dependent on Him’’ (pp. 14, 17, 16, 21). At the heart of
successful prayer, states Heiler, dwells the ‘‘expression’’ of one’s ‘‘weakness
and dependency.’’ One ‘‘submits’’ entirely to ‘‘God’s will’’ and strives to make
such ‘‘submission’’ a ‘‘permanent attitude’’ (p. 268). In fact, the ‘‘feeling of
80 Becoming God’s Children
you will understand very readily this aspect of prayer. Your infant child cannot
formulate in words a single petition to you. Yet the little one prays the best way
he knows how. All he can do is cry, but you understand very well his pleading
cry. All you need to do is see him in all his helpless dependence upon you,
and a prayer touches your mother-heart, a prayer which is stronger than the
loudest cry. He who is Father of all that is called mother and all that is called
child in heaven and on earth deals with us in the same way.
(p. 14)
The Infantilizing Process 81
Thus, we leave everything ‘‘in His hands.’’ We cling in our helplessness to the
‘‘spirit of prayer’’ whenever we pray. We know ‘‘the Lord is at our side,’’ and
therefore we no longer feel frightened (pp. 105, 102, 119). Indeed, we know
He is there constantly, and so we may tell Him ‘‘throughout the day,’’ and
during the nighttime, too, ‘‘how dependent we are upon Him.’’ When his
own ‘‘little boy’’ comes to him with ‘‘round baby eyes’’ and asks for his assis-
tance, Hallesby writes, he sees at once the manner in which everyone should
approach the ‘‘heavenly Father’’ (p. 121). We must ‘‘let our holy and almighty
God care for us just as an infant surrenders himself to his mother’s care’’ (p. 20).
And by the way, Hallesby is perfectly aware of the psychological dimension
of the discussion; he is not using the theme of dependency in some meta-
phorical fashion: ‘‘Psychologically,’’ he states, ‘‘helplessness is the sustaining
and impelling power of prayer’’ (p. 25). Heiler agrees (p. 32) and also turns
to childhood in illustration. The feeling of ‘‘dependence and impotence’’
is the key to successful praying, for we have no genuine power of our own;
we are like ‘‘children who can do nothing’’ (p. 36). It is precisely this child-
like mind-set, this child-like ‘‘trust and surrender,’’ holds Heiler (pp. 130–31),
that marks all the ‘‘eminent men’’ with a ‘‘genius for prayer,’’ all the ‘‘great
men of religion’’ (p. 253). We turn to God ‘‘in prayer,’’ writes Guardini, ‘‘as
the child in distress turns to his mother.’’ Jesus taught us, Guardini goes on,
‘‘that we should turn to the Father and ask Him for our daily bread,’’ for
the ‘‘necessities’’ of our ‘‘daily life’’ (p. 77). This is because the Almighty
knows best what is ‘‘needful’’ for us. He knows how to love us truly, how to
look after us in our ‘‘helplessness’’ and ‘‘want’’ (p. 78). ‘‘God will be found
in supplication,’’ claims George Arthur Buttrick, ‘‘not by our seeking’’ but
‘‘by a response . . . to One of whom we are dimly aware—as a child, half wak-
ing, responds to the mother who bends over him.’’30 When we pray, main-
tains Jones, ‘‘we take hold of His willingness to listen and move; we exercise
our right as children to influence a loving parent’’ (p. 107). Cries Horatius
Bonar in The New Book of Christian Prayers: ‘‘Lead me by Thine own hand,
choose out the path for me.’’31 Once again, a thousand similar quotations
may be instantly found in the literature. The dependent child relying on
the loving Parent-God is probably Christianity’s most common depiction of
the supplicatory relationship. Thus a culminating question arises: why does
successful prayer hinge so decisively upon the assumption of an infantile,
child-like state, a state of helplessness, dependence, and submission that is
persistently rendered in terms that recall the early parent-child interaction?
The ritual is designed to trigger the attractor state, to ‘‘prime’’ the worshiper
for the reawakening of the core relationship with the biological caregiver. One’s
praying becomes the ‘‘cue’’ for the emergence of implicit, state-dependent
82 Becoming God’s Children
memory, for the inward perception and feeling that one is still united with
the parental object, now transmuted through religious narrative into the invis-
ible, compassionate Deity of the putative supernatural realm. This is why the
worshiper ‘‘turns to God as the child in distress turns to his mother’’; why
he ‘‘lets God care for him as an infant surrenders himself to his mother’s care’’;
why he adopts an attitude of ‘‘child-like trust,’’ of utter ‘‘dependency’’ and
‘‘helplessness,’’ frequently upon his knees (preambulation). In the performance
of this infantilizing enactment or ‘‘play,’’ the very heart of Christian faith,
the worshiper seeks unconsciously to undo the past, to reverse the flow of time,
to restore the enormous adaptational advantages he possessed as a symbiotic
partner or ‘‘organ’’ of an omnipotent, loving protector and provider. The rite
of prayer attests, on the one hand, to the preciousness and power of the first
relationship, to the severity of our early needs, to the depth of our conditioning
as little ones when asking and receiving were the order of the day, to the persis-
tence of our longing for unconditional love and care—in a word, to the urgency
of our unconscious requirements as they arise from the foundational years.
On the other hand, and just as significantly, the rite of supplication reflects
the anxieties and the exigencies of the moment, the problematical now of the
prayer’s existence, his present concerns, his present wishes (including those for
the future), his present need for reassurance and support. Writes Walter Burkert,
‘‘Rituals are complicated, ambivalent, and not seldom opaque even to those
who practice them. . . . It makes more sense to see them as cultural attempts
to make the ‘facts of life’ manageable and predictable; to perform an act of
artificial social creation, as if to veil biology.’’32 We don’t have to puzzle very
long to espy the biology that is veiled by supplication: separation from
the matrix; the loss of infantile omnipotence; dealing with a dangerous,
unpredictable world; the inescapable facts of accident, illness, aging, and
death. The point is, Christianity is not merely based imagistically on an
infantile model through baptismal doctrine; it actually recreates one
in prayer. Suppliants, spurred on by their synaptic structure, by the very
neurological makeup of their mind-brains, act out their infantile wishes.
The biological foundation of infantile life is ritualistically transformed
through homeopathic magic into the cornerstone of Christian practice.
literature of supplication. How could it not? The passion for symbiotic union
is but a variation on prayer’s central figure, namely, that of the helpless child
crying out to the mighty Parent-God. In this way, the most primitive,
elemental asking and receiving that one enacts in prayer stems from the most
primitive, elemental experience one undergoes early on, namely, that of
existing as an ‘‘organ’’ of the parent, that of being oneself and the caregiver,
too. The ‘‘yearning for union,’’ maintains Guardini, is the ‘‘first motive of
prayer.’’ Our ‘‘soul longs for union with God.’’ We ‘‘cannot be without
Him.’’ When we pray, ‘‘our prayer becomes love, for love means seeking
to be completely at one with another autonomous being’’ (pp. 55–58).
Yet, Guardini goes on, ‘‘only God can create that nearness that fulfills our
yearning.’’ Because desire for the Almighty is ‘‘inborn in human nature,’’
we ‘‘cry’’ for Him ‘‘again and again.’’ Guardini sums everything up with the
assertion that ‘‘the yearning for God, for union, is also prayer’’ (pp. 56–58,
my emphasis). Let’s look further.
Prayer’s ‘‘deepest motive,’’ observes Heiler, ‘‘is the burning desire of the heart
which finds rest in blissful union with God’’ (p. 104). The ‘‘yearning for blessed
union,’’ Heiler continues, is capable of ‘‘overbearing’’ all the other ‘‘themes’’ that
often find their way into supplication, namely, ‘‘guilt, grace, and sin’’ (p. 127).
In fully successful prayer, states Heiler, ‘‘God and soul are bound together in
indissoluble unity.’’ The ‘‘contrast of subject and object which rules the soul’s
normal life is dissolved.’’ One ‘‘fuses with Him in deepest unity.’’ One encoun-
ters Him ‘‘face to face’’ (pp. 141–42, 160). ‘‘God is in me and I am in Him,’’
cries Elsa of Neustadt (cited in Heiler, p. 142). ‘‘I sink myself in Thee; I in
Thee, Thou in me,’’ exclaims Gerhard Tersteegen (cited in Heiler, p. 190).
‘‘Thou alone art my food and drink,’’ pronounces Thomas à Kempis (cited in
Heiler, p. 209). ‘‘If I am not united with Thee I shall be forever unhappy,’’
insists Gertrude of Hefta (cited in Heiler, p. 209). ‘‘I am Thou and Thou art I,’’
declare ecstatic, mystical prayers worldwide (see Heiler, p. 190). The famous
historian Arnold Toynbee expresses it this way:
Of special fascination is the extent to which the urge for prayerful union with
God reflects, or better, picks up, the phenomenology of the early parent-child
84 Becoming God’s Children
project will fail. We must always bear in mind, contends Guardini, that our
new life, in contrast with our old, natural one of thoughts and feelings,
is essentially hidden; in fact, ‘‘it rarely penetrates the threshold of cognition’’
(p. 8). Thus, the danger ceaselessly lurks that one may ‘‘neglect it and allow
it to be smothered.’’ How can this be? That is, how can our new life be so pre-
cious to us, so crucial, so all-determining, and at the same time so indistinct,
so elusive, so fragile? The answer lies in the fact that this life emanates from
a spirit, from the ‘‘Holy Ghost’’ (p. 8). It is given to us by God through
the ‘‘Holy Ghost,’’ and we must tend to it as the ‘‘mother’’ tends to her
‘‘new-born child’’ (p. 8).
As Guardini develops this theme over several pages, a number of key ideas
and images emerge. Although we need God and God knows we need Him,
‘‘we cannot perceive’’ Him ‘‘in the manner in which we perceive objects
and people’’ (p. 9). God is ‘‘more real than anything else,’’ and yet He is also
hidden. He can be seen only by ‘‘the inner eye of faith,’’ by an ‘‘inner vision’’
that is ‘‘often clouded’’ (p. 9). In this way, ‘‘we have no immediate experience
of God’’ (p. 9, my emphasis). Only through ‘‘faith’’ may we find him in
‘‘the emptiness and darkness of the unknown’’ (p. 9, my emphasis). It is, notes
Guardini, ‘‘a great mystery’’ (p. 9).40 To prepare ourselves for supplication,
then, we must concentrate; we must ‘‘exclude everything else’’ from our percep-
tion; we must ‘‘recall ourselves from everyone and everywhere.’’ God alone
‘‘matters now’’ (pp. 13–14). We must go inward until we can say with Moses,
‘‘Here am I’’ (Exod. 3:4) (p. 15). Additionally, we must ‘‘awaken our inner
intention’’ so that it may ‘‘focus itself on its object.’’ We must ‘‘clear the inner
eye’’ so that it sees true (p. 16). We must step into that ‘‘mysterious place’’ of
supplication, into that ‘‘centre of power’’ where the self resides, where the self
can ‘‘take root’’ and ‘‘be present’’ (p. 18, my emphasis). What is this mysteri-
ous place? It is ‘‘the realm of the spirit,’’ states Guardini (p. 19), a realm where
we may realize, in the midst of our concentration, that ‘‘God is here,’’ the
‘‘Living,’’ the ‘‘Holy,’’ is here, and ‘‘here also am I’’ (p. 21). Accomplishing
this supplicatory task, observes our theological instructor, means drawing
upon sources that lie deeper in our being, deeper than our ‘‘conscious facul-
ties’’ (p. 21). We have to find the depth of our ‘‘essential being’’ and dwell
therein. Although God is in the world, He is not of the world. When we
say He is present, He ‘‘remains hidden,’’ even as we say it (p. 22). Only our
‘‘faith’’ can sustain us as we ‘‘journey out into this silent darkness’’ (p. 22, my
emphasis), for God is ‘‘as nobody and nothing is. He is from Himself and
by reason of Himself ’’ (p. 24). His attributes, His vibration, His breath alone
are in this world (p. 25). He is that which can’t be named, the ‘‘all-embracing
ineffable,’’ the ‘‘mystery of existence.’’ He has ‘‘no face as we understand it.’’
The Infantilizing Process 87
He is indeed ‘‘beyond all human concept’’ (pp. 25–26). These are the strange,
even astonishing truths that we must digest before we can successfully make
the journey. Guardini then moves closer to the thing itself, recapitulating
key notions in the context as he goes.
With the reader’s permission, I will also head directly toward the goal in a
series of brief, bold strokes. We withdraw to a secluded, silent place; there, we
find ‘‘the sanctuary of our innermost heart’’ in which He is ‘‘always present’’
(p. 35). We try to visualize his reality with our ‘‘inner eye.’’ Alone, concen-
trated, reverent, and kneeling, we achieve what Guardini terms ‘‘the invisible
attitude’’ (p. 39). The experience of prayer now commences: we enter a void
that is ‘‘vibrant with being.’’ We have the feeling He may be present in a
‘‘special, intimate way,’’ close to us, abiding, even though ‘‘we cannot
see Him’’ (p. 43). Then comes the climax: ‘‘into this void of not-seeing,
not-hearing, and not-experiencing, there may at times enter something,
something inexpressible, yet significant—a hint of meaning amidst apparent
nothingness which prevails over the nothingness’’ (p. 44). What is this some-
thing that enters? What is it that is here, that is present with us? What is it
that ‘‘our spiritual organs of perception’’ are detecting (p. 45)? It is, declares
Guardini, a ‘‘breath,’’ a ‘‘vibration,’’ both ‘‘faint and intangible’’ (p. 44).
And he continues, with great conviction,
This breath, this vibration, is the manifestation of God; faint and intangible
though it is, it can support our faith, so that we may persevere. If faith perse-
veres the void may suddenly be filled, for God is not a mere fantasy or idea,
or feeling, but the all-pervading reality. He does not dwell above us indifferent
in the blissful remoteness of celestial spheres, but with us.
(p. 44)
If we want Him, if we wish to have Him in our lives, then we must ask for
Him, seek for Him, cry out for Him in prayer (p. 45). There is no other
way. Prayer alone opens the door to the ‘‘reality of God’’ (p. 45).
What we have here are vividly descriptive, detailed instructions for reach-
ing, not the realm of the Spirit, but the realm of implicit recollection, the
unconscious, the uncanny. We withdraw from everyday reality; we choose
some isolated, solitary spot; there, we turn our attention inward toward
the sphere of our subjectivity; we concentrate intensively as we enter the void,
the mysterious darkness, the deep psychic strata well below the threshold of
our consciousness. What are we looking for in our ‘‘invisible attitude’’? What
is it that we are seeking in our withdrawn, concentrated condition, upon our
knees, reverently, as ‘‘little children’’? We are seeking a hidden spirit with a
nonordinary face and body, a concealed ‘‘centre of power,’’ where the self,
88 Becoming God’s Children
our self, not only takes root but enjoys its essential being. The loving God we
struggle to detect is inextricably connected to us. Then what happens, if all
goes well? We sense that we are not alone; the ‘‘void’’ is filled; something else
is with us; something else is ‘‘present.’’ We detect, perhaps, a breath, or per-
haps a vibration, and as Guardini says, it is enough to convince us that we’ve
made contact. The elusive, hidden, mysterious spirit (Holy Spirit or Holy
Ghost) is there. Intimate union prevails over ‘‘nothingness.’’ As it turns out,
of course, that ‘‘spirit’’ has always been there in a perfectly natural, nonspiri-
tual way. What we’ve contacted through our supplicatory action is the deeply
internalized, synaptic trace of a relationship, not an object or a thing, but a
relationship. More specifically, we’ve rediscovered the origins of our selfhood
in loving, affective attunement, the intimate, awakening interaction from
which our awareness of and participation in the world arose—a breath, a
vibration, a hidden, mysterious, foundational presence, namely, ourselves
and the ministering other in face-to-face, life-sustaining symbiosis. Guardini’s
‘‘void’’ is the great space of memory, the yawning past, the yawning
implicit, unconscious region, the darkness from which we emerge through
the succoring attentions of the apparition-like parental figure who hovers
over us in the beginning. Once again from Buttrick, ‘‘God will be found by
a response [in prayer] to One of whom we are dimly aware—as a child,
half-waking, responds to the mother who bends over him.’’41 Remember,
the caregiver is attuned to our needs. When she responds empathetically to
our requirements, we are filled with wonderful, addictive sensations, vibra-
tions, energies, with our feeling response to her powerful transformational
capacities. Indeed, the caregiver’s loving, feeling ministrations may be said
to awaken us to life, to ‘‘switch us on,’’ to make us ‘‘hum’’ with the feeling
of existence itself. We are alive, we are vibrating, not simply because she
was, but because she communicated her aliveness to us and through us, or
conversely, because her rays, her energies, protected us from the deadness that
the lack of mothering invariably engenders. Our genetic vitality must be nur-
tured into life. It is not the Holy Spirit who does this but another human
being. A person, not a spirit, has this power, which explains why Christianity
paradoxically and passionately and intuitively insists that the Holy Spirit is
both a spirit and a person: the worshiper must be reminded of this person-
hood doctrinally so that he may bring to supplication, as well as to various
other rites and beliefs that foster sacred union, an implicit or feeling recollec-
tion of his own biological life, for it is precisely such recollection that will
trigger the attractor state of parent-child bonding and hence, the worshiper’s
theological, emotional assent to the particulars of the creed, its spiritual
entities and supernatural claims. We pray for many reasons, of course, and
The Infantilizing Process 89
among them is the longing to get back to the source of our aliveness, to feel
still again the indelible, primal ‘‘hit’’ we felt over and over again during the
early time as the caregiver focused her loving energies, her loving rays, upon
us. We eagerly adopt the infantile model of supplication because we would
have that, again and again, just as we had it early on—world without end.
Guardini’s guide to supplication returns us to the period of one common
breathing, one common heartbeat, the period of not only face-to-face but
breast-to-breast contact, of exquisitely sensitive empathetic bonding, of keen,
almost subliminal registration of the smallest bodily sign, the tiniest shift
of mood, of atmosphere, the tiniest stirring of infantile life, the breath,
the vibration of our inchoate existence as it was neurally mapped onto our
emergent mind-brain. This is what we are listening for in Guardini’s ‘‘void.’’
This is what we may detect within our inward organs of perception. Let’s bear
firmly in mind that Guardini asks us (p. 77), as do other doctors of prayer, to
approach the Lord as the child in distress approaches his mother. We are
instructed to return psychologically, attitudinally, perceptually, emotionally
to specifically the first relationship from which our awareness of things arises.
Clearly then, the principles of imitative magic lurk between the lines of Guar-
dini’s Prayer in Practice. His discussion comprises a kind of magical sequence
directed at the self, a kind of self-magic, a kind of self-induced magical trance
that entirely depends upon our empathy toward ourselves, upon our own
keen listening, upon our own keen attention, upon our own keen ability to
detect our essential, originative being, our own relational roots in the mysteri-
ous interactional past of intimate vibrations and breathings. The face of God
is unique, mysterious, and nonordinary because it is both a face and a mirror;
it contains the unconscious lineaments of the relationship in which the self
was born; the body of God is unique, mysterious, nonordinary because it
reflects both a oneness and a twoness, a process of symbiotic joining,
or union, from which a single, living creature emerges into personhood.
‘‘We have no immediate experience of God’’ (p. 9) because our experience
is embedded in the mnemonic recesses of our early existence (the realm of
infantile amnesia), the strong time of life-giving nurturance and vitality when
the parental ‘‘centre of power’’ was our center, our universe, our all. Accord-
ingly, we are able to discover the supernatural realm because we’ve been there
all along; we’ve always existed in a realm of hidden, unseen presences. Guar-
dini is merely guiding us to our own inner world, to the traces of elemental,
affective ‘‘vibrations’’ that resonate at our deepest psychological levels, and
when we find that place we are persuaded and call it ‘‘God’’ or ‘‘Holy Spirit’’
because we have no other perceptual way of explaining it to ourselves.
We can’t see our implicit recollections, of which the Holy Spirit is ultimately
90 Becoming God’s Children
one. There is a mystery here, to be sure, but it is the mystery of the uncon-
scious, not of the supernatural. Everything involved in the Holy Spirit’s
arrival, everything without exception, has been in our minds and only in
our minds all along; or, to turn the coin over, there is nothing involved here
outside of ourselves.
We continually hear from the religious experts that prayer is rooted in the
unconscious, reaches into the unconscious, arises from the unconscious,
engages the unconscious regions, and so forth, but we are never offered any-
thing specific on this score, never told how the process works, and never made
aware of the connections. ‘‘Religious emotions in the pious man,’’ states
Heiler, ‘‘force their way unconsciously and unexpectedly, from evident and
inner necessity, to expression in prayer. Prayer wells up from the subconscious
life of the soul’’ (p. 233). And again, ‘‘Men take over faith in God from the
community in which they were born; but how it first arose cannot here be
discussed; doubtless it flowed from a whole series of psychological forces’’
(p. 3). Prayer, asserts Dossey, is grounded in ‘‘the power of the unconscious
instead of the conscious mind’’; it ‘‘need not always be ‘thought.’ . . . ‘Uncon-
scious prayer’ is possible’’ (p. 18). When we pray successfully, holds James,
‘‘subconscious forces take the lead’’ (p. 195). One’s ‘‘whole subconscious life,’’
one’s ‘‘impulses, . . . faiths, . . . needs, . . . divinations,’’ has ‘‘prepared the
premises of which [one’s] consciousness now feels the weight of the result’’
(p. 73). As for those premises themselves, as for the ‘‘divine personages’’ that
determine the attitudes and practices of the believer, including his supplica-
tion, they are ‘‘exerted by the instrumentality of pure ideas, of which nothing
in the individual’s past experience directly serves as a model’’ (p. 55). We may
now appreciate, however, that something is there in the ‘‘individual’s past
experience’’ that does ‘‘directly serve as a model.’’ I am referring, of course,
to the basic biological situation, internalized deeply into the worshiper’s
mind-brain and explicitly extended in Christian theological handbooks as
the chief imitative prerequisite to successful supplication. No one invented
prayer. It arose from the unconscious strata through the irresistible interac-
tion of neurological structure and wishful affect. It was and still is dedicated
to the emotionally attractive, soothing proposition that we are not separate,
and alone, and impotent, and mortal, in an enigmatic, indifferent universe.
Surely from this perspective we may now grasp why the doctors of prayer
inform us that we receive simply by asking, indeed, that our asking is our
receiving. It goes like this: when we ask we restore the early period; we trigger
in the unconscious the symbiotic union we enjoyed in the beginning; we jog
through our prayerful state the state-dependent memory of our attachment to
the loving provider. Merely to pray, then, is to gain what we are seeking.
The Infantilizing Process 91
The Eucharist
Baptism creates the broad psychological framework within which the prac-
tice of Christianity will move forward, namely, the framework of the parent-
child relationship with Jesus as ‘‘Abba’’ and the practitioner as ‘‘little child’’
following after his parental guide. Prayer, as we’ve just seen, encourages the
worshiper to act out this relationship on a regular basis by adopting an attitude
of helplessness and dependency, by asking the Big One for assistance, love, and
support. When the Christian turns to his Lord as an infant in distress turns to
his mother, to echo the theological experts, he manifests his faith, which is to
say, he establishes himself as a genuine believer in the Christian plan for achiev-
ing ‘‘salvation.’’ With the Eucharist we come to what we may regard as the third
pillar of the ritualistic structure on which the Christian religion is founded, to
what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls ‘‘the source and summit of the
Christian life.’’42 Here, through a ceremony in which the body and the blood
of a god are actually or symbolically consumed, the magical nature of the
believer’s participation, the believer’s construction of his alternate, magical iden-
tity, becomes so palpable, so striking, may I say so transparent, that it has for
2,000 years elicited the critical attention of a wide variety of observers including
ardent, devout Christians themselves. Writes Stafford in Knowing the Face of
God, ‘‘In a sacrificial meal an ox never became other than an ox. The sacrificial
meals were certainly not considered divine flesh. They were mere dead animals
augmented by cereal or oil. Nor is there a precedent in our own experience.
No host has ever asked me if I would like to nibble on him. How, then, can
we understand what Jesus meant?’’ Stafford then declares, ‘‘It was not entirely
unjust that the early Christians were accused of cannibalism. Any religion that
has a meal for its sacramental centerpiece and that speaks of eating the flesh
and the blood of its God is asking for misunderstanding.’’43 With an eye
focused sharply on the potential for ‘‘misunderstanding,’’ then, let’s begin to
examine both what Jesus may have ‘‘meant’’ by all this and what all this means
to us from the naturalistic, analytical angle we’re developing here.
John Wesley’s famous devotional poem takes us straight to the essence of
the matter.
Here is the core magical wish of the Christian religion as a whole: to enter
(or better, reenter) the body of the Parent-God and to remain in that body
forever, ‘‘eternally’’ as Wesley renders it. Christianity seeks to transform,
to metamorphose, to turn inside out or upside down nothing less than
the chief biological facts of our earthly existence, namely, the cessation of
infantile symbiosis, our separation from the original matrix of parental care;
our smallness, our vulnerability to the forces of nature, to the implacable
material world of accident and illness; and last, of course, our mortality,
the final, inevitable manifestation of the biological circumstance in which
we discover ourselves. All of this is simply erased as we crawl into the crucified
Jesus, using the wound in His side as our entrance way, and take up our
permanent residence there as ‘‘members’’ or ‘‘organs’’ of His sacred body.
Suddenly, magically, we are eternally secure, united with an all-powerful
protector and provider whose chief preoccupation and purpose in the world
is (like mother’s) neither more nor less than watching over us.
The biological facts of separation, smallness, and death are biblically pre-
sented in the Book of Genesis where the writer endeavors to explain why an
omnipotent, loving God would fashion such harsh realities for his specially
created offspring, His children. Adam and Eve, god-like, immortal, and
enjoying regular, consistent contact with their beneficent, all-powerful
Creator, succumb to the wiles of Satan (originally a diabolic figure in dualistic
Zoroastrianism appropriated by the ancient Hebrews) and immediately
lose their utopian advantages: they are separated from the paradisal garden
and its parental Designer; they are vulnerable to the adversarial forces
of their new, fallen surroundings against which they must now struggle
mightily and continuously; and finally, they must die and disappear
from the world forever—the most chilling result of their disobedience
to God’s injunctions. As for the advent of Jesus Christ in relation to the
Old Testamental depiction of our fallen, tragical nature, He arrives upon
the earth to put everything right again, to achieve, or better, reachieve,
the beginning, the strong time of loving union, empowered security,
and immortality as expressed in both baptismal rite and in the verses of
John Wesley, to which the reader’s attention was directed a few sentences
earlier. In a word, the advent of Jesus creates for the Christian a way to get back
in the paradisal garden his forebears lost, to regain the salvational arrangement
the Bible depicts in its opening passages. In the naturalistic terms I am
employing here, the Christian now possesses a magical, ritualistic method
The Infantilizing Process 93
to cancel out, to erase, to remove from the landscape the biological facts of
separation, smallness, and death that comprise the sorrowful conditions
of his ‘‘fallen’’ planetary journey.
What interests us here above all is the way in which the mythical materials in
the Book of Genesis simultaneously echo and veil the biological realities upon
which our lives are based. We are separated (or expelled) from the garden of
infantile, child-like innocence, as we develop toward adolescence and maturity;
we are deprived of our initial grandeur, our narcissistic omnipotence, as
our global identification with the parental big one gradually fades off; our
symbiotic, dependent relationship with our provider, our feeder, does ultimately
terminate as we begin to make our own way in a challenging and frequently dif-
ficult environment; we do confront eventually our own personal mortality, our
own personal demise and disappearance from the world: one day, as everyone
else preceding us and following us, we will be bodily, sensorially gone. All of this
reverberates beneath the mythical surface of Genesis which, as I’ve suggested
already, was fashioned by Hebrew scribes with a very good sense of the human
condition and a very strong urge to indicate how that condition arose in a
Creation molded by a loving Parent-God upon Whose mercies they relied
and to Whom they addressed their prayers.
The connection between ‘‘sin’’ and separation is a key item, of course, and
reflects in itself the biological reality of the first society, or the personal, pri-
vate Eden in which each of us discovers himself early on. When the child is
‘‘bad,’’ he or she experiences the diminishment of his or her affective affilia-
tion with or closeness to the governing parental presence; such looming
separation serves as a powerful incentive for the child to ‘‘behave.’’ Yet no
matter how ‘‘good’’ the child is, no matter how carefully he or she follows
the rules, he or she must still one day undergo separation from the initial
symbiotic interaction. Accordingly, the Edenic materials in the Book of
Genesis trigger in the believer foundational, implicit recollection of his
actual, developmental experience as he moves from primal union, from pri-
mal symbiotic bonding with the big one, toward his present, grown-up con-
dition of separation, smallness, and mortality. At the same time, the magical,
supernatural reversal of that ‘‘fallen’’ condition, its veiling, its erasure, its
cancellation, is also linked to biological facts, is also connected integrally to
biological conditions that are deeply grooved into our neurological makeup
at the level of implicit or unconscious memory. I mean, the supernatural
reversal, the veiling, the solution in short, also carries within itself the first
Edenic conditions of symbiotic union and narcissistic perfection that the
believer actually experienced at the biological level during the opening
months and years of his earthly existence. They too reside in the realm of
94 Becoming God’s Children
implicit memory; they too are rooted firmly, neurologically, and synaptically
in the unconscious realm of infantile amnesia and can thus be utilized on the
plane of magic. When the good news comes to supplant the bad news, it finds
its origins in the same biological place from which the bad news emanated.
The believer was at one time in, not out; the believer did know at one time
that someone was always there, watching over him. When Jesus enters with
his ‘‘comedic’’ resolution of life’s ‘‘tragedy’’ (restoration of Edenic perfection,
the cleansing of ‘‘sin,’’ and the saintly transcendence and immortality of each
and every sheep-like follower), He relies as do all talented healers and gurus
upon the biological realities the believers once experienced for themselves
during the course of their own lives. Salvation cannot be based on air,
on ‘‘spirits,’’ on words alone; it must also be based on flesh, for it is flesh
ultimately that prompts accession, that arouses the ‘‘yes, I believe’’ in the
candidate, in the prospective convert. The Savior’s invitation back into
the Garden feels real because the Garden is still there at the level of implicit,
biological, affective or fleshly memory.
To put the whole matter somewhat differently and in the process to recall
our earlier discussion of prayer’s nature and efficacy, when Jesus offers to
His followers His Edenic salvational scheme of divine union (‘‘we . . . are
one body in Christ’’ [Rom. 12:5]), saintly cleansing (‘‘called to be saints’’
[I Cor. 1:2]), and immortality (‘‘O death, where is thy sting?’’ [I Cor. 15:55]),
when He invites His devotees to go back in, to enter His body, which is the
Church itself in its pure, Edenic, sinless condition, He awakens the Holy Spirit
in the worshiper, which means, He jogs the early, implicit recollection of actual,
biological experience, of infantile, childhood security, protection, provision,
and love that resides neurologically, mnemonically, at the foundation of
the worshiper’s mental apparatus. The early period of symbiotic, biologic
interaction is mythically reentered or resubmitted into the mind-brain such
that it calls forth the implicit, unconscious, feeling recollection of the desired
salvational condition. In the simplest possible terms, to be ‘‘saved’’ Christian
style, one must be ‘‘innocent’’ as a baby is innocent; and one must be attached
to or contained in the body of a Parent-God, or a God/Church that is the
body of a Parent-God (Jesus’s body [I Cor. 12:27]). One must be in an organ
relationship. Salvation is finally morphological and entails the interfusion of
bodies, which is the vital, primal essence of neotenous, human, biological
infancy and childhood. When this essence is reexperienced mnemonically,
when it is reentered into the perceptual apparatus disguisedly yet recogniz-
ably through sacred myth and magical rite—in short, when this essence is
experienced again through state-dependent memory it precipitates the emer-
gence of associative affect known doctrinally as ‘‘the Holy Spirit.’’45 One can
The Infantilizing Process 95
feel his own salvation, and the truth of Christian doctrine, because one har-
bors a premanufactured version of both in his own neurologic, memorial
makeup. ‘‘Yes,’’ says the convert, in the grip of his wishful emotions; ‘‘I can
be saved; I can unite with Christ; I can be pure and innocent; I can escape
extinction; the Edenic message is true; Paradise can be regained. Hallelulia!’’
In this way, the entire magical, mythical structure of Christianity, as founded
on the Old and New Testaments, and especially on the New Testamental
notion of the Holy Spirit, is rooted in the biological experience of the
worshiper and in nothing else. Paradoxically revealed and veiled in the same
mythic, magical, religious moment, Christian theology provides the believer
with an alternate ‘‘spiritual’’ self in which he can defensively or adaptively
indulge himself while the biological facts and destiny of his actual bodily life
simply go forward on the earth. No wonder the Holy Spirit is regarded by the
Christian faith as ‘‘the Comforter.’’46 It, the Holy Spirit, provides the reli-
gious seeker with the implicit memorial materials that goad him or in a very
real sense ‘‘spook’’ him into accepting the reality of supernatural entities with
the capacity to alter, metamorphose, and transform the ineluctable biological
facts of separation, smallness, and death to which his earthly existence is and
always will be irreversibly linked.
The Eucharist’s significance from this analytic angle comes clearly into
view: it, the Eucharist, provides the believer with a magic, ritualistic way to
get into the body of Jesus, and to get Jesus’s body into his own. It is psycho-
logically morphological, devoted to the interfusion of bodies. Let’s remember,
the rite of baptism from which the believer emerges newborn as the ‘‘little
child’’ of the Parent-God is officially, theologically, doctrinally completed in
and through the Eucharist wherein the worshiper becomes ‘‘a living member
of,’’ indeed ‘‘ingrafted to,’’ the ‘‘body’’ of Jesus Christ, either symbolically as
in various Protestant enactments, or ‘‘transubstantially’’ as in Catholic and
High Protestant practices.47 Accordingly, the Eucharist allows the worshiper
to reinstate mnemonically the organ relationship, the morphological interfu-
sion, that distinguishes his initial biological condition, the opening circum-
stance of his existence on the planet. His baptismal, Eucharistic state
achieves as its implicit, dynamic underpinning the neurological, state-
dependent memory of what he actually knew and relied upon during the
months and years in which his neotenous, helpless condition made him
utterly dependent on the big one for his survival and well-being. He fed
upon the caregiver physically and emotionally in order to have life, and now
he does so again. Here, precisely here, is the origin of the magical, homeo-
pathic, alternate identity with which Christianity provides its followers
to ensure not only their sense of security as they go about their lives but also
96 Becoming God’s Children
their passionate attachment to the creed, their wish, their longing to cleave
unto the Church, a Church that offers itself to the worshiper as literally the
body of Christ.48 Separation, smallness, mortality; our biological heritage;
the consequence of our putative lapse in the Garden of Eden—all of that
vanishes miraculously when we eat the Lord’s flesh and drink the Lord’s
blood, thus getting Him inside of us and us inside of Him. The worshiper
gets ‘‘hooked’’ on his religion, or alternatively, surrenders to the Holy Spirit
working within him, when the implicit recollection of his original biological
dependency (the ‘‘opiate’’) bites mythically into his emotive memorial
structure. It helps markedly, of course, that such magical goings-on transpire
within cathedrals and churches, otherworldly, mysterious, cultic habitations
in which priestly, ‘‘spiritual’’ emissaries from the beyond, attired in special,
distinguishing garb, administer the miraculous bread and wine. Kneeling
with open mouths, the bedazzled ‘‘little children,’’ the religious seekers,
take in their transformational materials like little birds, trusting in the
all-powerful Big One to give them union, protection, and everlasting life:
‘‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me,/let me hide myself in thee,’’ or as Wesley put it
in the verses at which we earlier glanced, ‘‘concealed in the cleft of Thy
side,/Eternally held in Thy heart.’’
Let’s recall Jesus’s New Testamental pronouncements on the ingestion of
His flesh and blood:
Verily, verily I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and
drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh
my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh
is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and
drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent
me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.
(John 6:53–57)
Thus are we returned to the Beginning, to the strong time of our inception:
the flesh and blood of Jesus, who has taken the place of the biological parent
(Matt. 10:35–38) and become the Parent-God of His newly baptized ‘‘little
children’’ (Matt. 18:3), give ‘‘life’’ explicitly to His followers, His offspring,
creating them afresh and altered along magical, ritualistic lines. When His
devotees, His communicants, eat His flesh and drink His blood, they abolish
ego boundaries; they restore the stage of symbiotic oneness, the initial bio-
logical condition that precedes the passage to the separation stage of develop-
ment. The partakers ‘‘dwell’’ in their Parent-God, and their Parent-God
dwells in them, with no separation stage in view. The organic interfusion, the
morphological mixing of bodies, goes on forever, ‘‘eternally’’ as John Wesley
The Infantilizing Process 97
sometimes think’’ (p. 96). The sacrifice of Jesus and our partaking of the Holy
Supper are a ‘‘living reality’’ (p. 97). What Stafford intuits here is the extent to
which the Eucharist, accomplished along both Catholic and Protestant lines,
has the associative power to penetrate the communicant all the way down to
the foundational levels of his mind wherein reside the ‘‘most intimate’’ affective
wishes of his human life.
Clearly then, Eucharistic magic as it follows upon baptismal regeneration
from which the Christian emerges as a ‘‘little child’’ of the explicitly parental
Deity provides the worshiper with exactly what he craves in his ‘‘fallen,’’ bio-
logical condition of smallness, separation, and mortality: an ‘‘inner personal
companion’’ who is always there, even in the hour of death. ‘‘He will not let
me go.’’ The practicing follower of Christ will never be alone again, will never
be separated from his loving Protector and Provider, will never be out as
opposed to in, will never be at the mercy of the biological forces to which
raw nature exposes him. The curses of ‘‘life’’ as we know them ordinarily
are lifted. Interfused with, ingrafted to, sealed into, contained within and also
containing Christ’s body, Christ’s person (remember, the Holy Spirit is a
person), the Christian only seems to be walking around on his own, a small,
separate, vulnerable mortal man or woman. In the alternate, magical ‘‘reality’’
of his baptismal, Eucharistic state, with Jesus in his belly, the Big One in his
prayers, and the Holy Spirit suffusing his existence from within, he is just
the opposite: ‘‘perfectly united’’ (Fisher, p. 406) with his Parent-God in
whose ‘‘power’’ (Stafford, p. 94) he participates, and headed toward heavenly,
everlasting bliss rather than a dreary grave. Here is the substitutional, homeo-
pathic identity the Christian seeks at the deep, primal levels of his anxious,
mortal frame. Here is the world of the ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ in which he may feel-
ingly luxuriate forevermore, ‘‘saved’’ as he is from what the poor, tragical rest
of us must undergo and endure.
Note the dynamic, unforgettable expression of all this transformational
magic in Great Christian Prayers.52 Read the following lines with the theoretical
context of this section sharply in focus.
He is in my heart, He is in heaven:
Both there and here He shows Himself to me with equal glory.
(Saint Symeon, p. 70)
We rejoice, O Lord our God, in Thy almighty power and glory. Raise Thou us
up with Thee, O Blessed Savior, above all earthly desires. Inspire us with
thoughts of joy, of hope and love. Enter Thou within the chamber of our hearts,
and say unto us, Peace be unto you. Give us the grace to see Thee, blessed Sav-
iour, the eyes of our understanding being enlightened, that we may know Thee
100 Becoming God’s Children
walking by our side, in this our earthly pilgrimage. Come unto us, O our Lord,
and dwell within us.
(Saint Bernardine, p. 86)
Here is the image of the companion Himself ‘‘walking by the side’’ of the
Christian believer, indeed ‘‘dwelling’’ within the believer’s ‘‘heart’’ as ego
boundaries dissolve. How does that famous old Christian tune go? ‘‘And
He walks with me,/And He talks with me,/And He tells me I am His own.’’
Have we hallucination in all this? Mildly, we do. But in the main, we have
the powerful sensation of the person (the Holy Spirit) being there as that
sensation arises from the realm of implicit recollection, or state-dependent
memory. When the religious magic bites, it creates in the worshiper an
inward state that affectively recalls the symbiotic arrangement of the early
time that was taken indelibly into the memorial apparatus.
Finally we have, from our own era,
O Lord God, I thank Thee that Thou leadest me by a way which I know not,
which is above the level of my poor understanding. I thank Thee that Thou
are not repelled by my bitterness, that Thou are not turned aside by the heat
of my spirit. There is no force in this universe so glorious as the force of Thy
love; it compels me to come in. O divine servitude, O slavery that makes me
free, O love that imprisons me only to set my feet in a larger room, enclose
me more and more within Thy folds. Protect me from the impetuous desires
of my nature—desires as short-lived as they are impetuous. Ask me not where
I would like to go; tell me where to go; lead me in Thine own way; hold me
in Thine own light. Amen.
(George Matheson, p. 181)
another place that the Church’s ‘‘message is in harmony with the most secret
desires of the human heart,’’53 it forges for us a connection the ultimate sig-
nificance of which we can now fully see and understand. It is the primary
psychological meaning of the Eucharist that comprises not only the ‘‘heart’’
of the Church but ‘‘the most secret desires of the human heart,’’ namely, the
intertwining desires to be inside the Big One and to have the Big One inside
oneself. The worshiper, the churchgoer, does not want to confront the uni-
verse alone; he wants to confront it as he did during the opening stages of
his existence when someone was there. We are not in the realm of the miracu-
lous divine here, the realm of ‘‘ultimately inexpressible mystery,’’ as Maurice
Wiles puts it in The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity.54 Indeed, the
so-called mystery arises only from the difficulties attendant upon psychologi-
cally deciphering the magical system conjured up by Christian thought and
practice. From where, after all, could the powerful emotions and devotions
of Christ’s followers come if not from the flesh and blood experiences of their
own actual lives? The Holy Spirit is a person, an actual person, because persons
and only persons make up the foundational core of our earthly being. We’re
the only ones home.
Moment-to-Moment Christianity
Reborn as God’s ‘‘little child’’ through one’s ongoing baptismal frame of
mind, persistently ‘‘asking and receiving’’ (Mark 11:24) as the Lord’s helpless,
needy, prayerful petitioner, ingesting and mixing bodily with the Almighty
on a regular basis through Eucharistic rite—here is the central outline of
the Christian’s alternate, magical identity, the homeopathic other self that
transcends one’s stark biological condition, the imperfect handiwork of post-
lapsarian nature. Yet all this is not enough—far from it! To make the transfor-
mation more thorough, to approximate the goal of escaping the small,
separate, mortal state in which one discovers himself on earth, to accomplish
the Beginning all over again by resurrecting the symbiotic union of loving
caregiver and sheltered offspring, the Christian must go about his daily life,
his routines, his normal activities and commissions, in a mental and emo-
tional attitude of total, unremitting, moment-to-moment dependency on
the supernatural Big One. His frame of mind, his mode of being, his entire
existence in every aspect of it, must imitate, act out, magically recreate
the relationship of the impotent, powerless, vulnerable child in the care of
the protective, succoring parent (the inner companion). Everywhere in the
literature of Christianity this theme is ceaselessly, ardently trumpeted forth
in a stream of remarkable, unforgettable passages that demand psychological
102 Becoming God’s Children
explanation and that are inspired directly by Jesus’s New Testamental pro-
nouncement, ‘‘without me ye can do nothing’’ (John 15:5), a pronouncement
the Catechism of the Catholic Church dutifully echoes as follows: ‘‘without
Him we can do nothing.’’55
State Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King in their reverential
Experiencing God,
He alone has the right to initiate what you are to be involved in. . . . As you
respond to Him in simple, childlike trust, you will find a whole new way of
looking at life to begin for you. Your life will be fulfilling. You will never have
to sense an emptiness or lack of purpose. He always fills your life with
Himself.56
They continue,
And then, in a decisive utterance that repeats the words of Christ and the Cat-
echism just cited: ‘‘without Him you can do nothing’’ (p. 31). Allow me to
offer a few more lines from Blackaby and King so as to capture the full flavor
of their thinking. ‘‘Lord, just tell me what to do one step at a time and I will
do it. . . . Just tell me where I am heading, then I will be able to set my course
and go. . . . Wherever you want me to be, I’ll go. Whatever the circum-
stances, I’m willing to follow’’ (pp. 32–33). And again, ‘‘if I do everything
He says, I will be in the center of His will. . . . God is absolutely trustworthy.
You can trust Him to guide you and provide for you’’ (pp. 34–36). In this
way, you can be ‘‘dependent on God above’’ (p. 42). He will ‘‘do through
you whatever He chooses, anything He pleases’’ (p. 46). And finally, in a
heartfelt supplication Blackaby and King declare, ‘‘God, I know I can do
nothing on my own. I know You can do anything You choose to do. I give
myself completely to You. Work through me any way You want to work’’
(p. 48). At only one stage of our lives does a single, all-powerful provider
and protector fill our entire universe. At only one stage are we yoked to
another in an organic, dyadic relationship of absolute trust, absolute love,
upon which our survival and well-being entirely depend. At only one stage
does our whole existence consist in following after a big one from whom
The Infantilizing Process 103
we fully and absolutely derive our guidance. At only one stage do we give our-
selves over completely to the will of a monumental controller. What we have
here are instructions for reawakening the early period, for reexperiencing
the movement of the caregiver within the realm of our implicit recollection.
And sure enough, as Blackaby and King make clear, if we do all this, if we
actually imitate (homeopathic magic) the behavior of a ‘‘simple child’’ to
employ their terminology, we ‘‘square ourselves up’’ with the ‘‘Holy Spirit’’
(p. 114) who begins to stir powerfully within us—which is to say, we begin
actually to rekindle the sensations of the initial symbiosis as they reside in
the mnemonic attractor state toward which we dutifully gravitate as we obey
Christianity’s instructions for our supernatural transformation. The magical
system, in the last analysis, is quite simple and straightforward: imitate the
early stages of your life (act like a child) within this lofty, mystifying, religious
context and you’ll arouse a variety of powerful, soothing, delicious sensations
that seem to come miraculously from within and that may be easily attached
to putative spiritual entities that your cognitive apparatus ultimately accepts
as ‘‘there,’’ particularly when such entities are theologically urged upon you
by authoritative figures such as parents, priests, and pastors.
The Holy Spirit, assert Henry Cloud and John Townsend, is ‘‘not a thing’’
but a ‘‘person.’’57 If we ‘‘yield’’ to the Almighty, if we ‘‘follow’’ Him, if we ‘‘cry
to Him’’ for succor and support, ‘‘He will come,’’ and not only come but,
through the Holy Spirit, ‘‘abide’’—which is to say ‘‘live in us’’ (the inner
companion) (p. 99). When that occurs, we ‘‘don’t have to live alone’’ ever
again (separation reversed), and we don’t have to exist ‘‘in our own power’’
ever again (relinquishment of autonomy). He will be ‘‘there’’ for us always
(pp. 98, 104). Accordingly, we must conceive of our relationship to the
Almighty, to Christ, and to the Holy Spirit—and here are the crucial
words—as a ‘‘moment-to-moment relationship of dependency’’ in which we
‘‘yield and follow,’’ in which we surrender all ‘‘control,’’ in which we fully
‘‘submit’’ (the dyadic essence of the early period) (p. 99). This, hold Cloud
and Townsend, is the ‘‘formula’’ for eternal salvation, the formula that ‘‘woos
us to Jesus,’’ that transforms and transfigures us (pp. 94, 99). ‘‘Remember,’’
they write, ‘‘He will come to live inside you’’ (again, the inner companion);
indeed, He will ‘‘invade’’ you if you ‘‘ask and then follow’’ (p. 99). What we
have in this, needless to say, is a striking, vivid counterpart to what we’ve just
discovered in Blackaby and King. Let’s sample a few more counterparts.
‘‘I need help! I can’t do it alone,’’ explains Rev. Schuller, indicating for his
readers the proper Christian posture in the presence of the all-powerful
Deity.58 ‘‘Cry out, surrender, ask for help,’’ Schuller admonishes, and do it
all the time as you adopt a ‘‘Be-Happy Attitude’’ toward your Savior, through
104 Becoming God’s Children
the Holy Spirit (p. 21). In other words, pray continuously, ‘‘face up to your
emotional lack, admit your weakness, stop trying to do it all by yourself ’’
(p. 28). Query your Heavenly Father as follows, Schuller persists: ‘‘Can you
help me? Can you direct me?’’ (p. 31). Confess to Him, ‘‘I’m helpless! I’m
ready to let go and let God take over’’ (p. 33). ‘‘Are you there, Jesus?’’ Schuller
urges us to ask. ‘‘Do You love me as much as I love you?’’ (p. 30). Could there
be a more compelling example of the Christian’s struggle to refind, recontact,
and reactualize the relationship of ‘‘moment-to-moment dependency’’ that he
enjoyed during life’s opening stages as he cleaved unto the Big One in whose
elemental, life-sustaining care he discovered himself? For the Christian, sim-
ply to mature biologically is to lose inward security, a life-defining loss that
drives him to indulge in magical behaviors through which (he believes) he
may regain security: ‘‘Christ, come to live in me. . . . Oh, God, I turn my life
over to You’’ (Schuller, p. 41). Now I am ‘‘a child of God’’ (p. 115). Here is
the ‘‘formula’’ indeed. Here is the naturalistic, psychological system of inward
reattachment to the original caregiver that dwells at the heart of Christianity
under the designation of ‘‘Holy Spirit.’’
‘‘We were never designed by God to function independently,’’ asserts
Anderson indelibly in his volume Who I Am in Christ,59 with the in recalling
our analysis of Eucharistic ‘‘function,’’ namely, to place the believer back into
the body of the big one, back into the symbiotic, organ relationship of the
early period, a ‘‘function’’ that applies to Christianity across the broad range
of its teachings and rituals. Whatever leads us to ‘‘function’’ on our own,
autonomously, as independent organisms on the earth, is rejected, repudi-
ated, and through homeopathic magic (rebirth and reattachment to the
supernatural Parent-God) inverted, or turned upside down. ‘‘Without
Christ,’’ claims Anderson, ‘‘we are incomplete.’’ With Christ, which is to
say in Christ, ‘‘we are made complete and fulfilled’’ (p. 98). God says to us,
‘‘You don’t need other people to make you happy; you need only Me. . . .
No other person can fill the vacuum. You were created to relate to God in
soul-union, and you can only find rest and purpose in your life’’—and here
are the vital words—‘‘when you put your total dependence on Him,’’ which
is but another way of describing, holds Anderson, a worshiper who is ‘‘filled
with the Spirit’’ (p. 99). Anderson declares in a powerful concluding state-
ment that calls to mind again both John 15:5 and the Catechism of the
Catholic Church, ‘‘If I am not operating by the power of the Holy Spirit,
I can accomplish nothing. I am complete only in Christ’’ (p. 99, my emphasis).
From our analytic, psychological perspective we may understand Anderson’s
final remarks this way: only when I recapture through the homeopathic
magic of Christian rite and doctrine the symbiotic union of the early period
The Infantilizing Process 105
The Spirit teaches us about God and also creates in us the faith that makes
us love that knowledge. Theologians have been driven to despair by this fact:
We cannot speak objectively about God; only through the eyes of faith may
we speak truly of Him. . . . His own Spirit is the light in which we see Him.
(p. 32)
And finally,
I want to reclaim the sense that God’s personality fills the earth. He is every-
where we turn, holding Himself out to us, asking to be known. . . . Jesus is all
around you. . . . His personality is spilling out on every side. . . . If you can begin
to see His personality as Himself, I think you will pursue the means of grace
with clearer eyes and greater excitement.
(p. 33)
Alright then, we may ask, how does one accomplish this? How does one
discover the Holy Spirit, and through the Holy Spirit his ‘‘faith’’ in God?
How does one manage to live in a world in which a personal, loving, unifying
presence ‘‘fills’’ one’s reality, is ‘‘everywhere,’’ ‘‘all around’’ one, ‘‘spilling out
on every side,’’ as was the case exactly during the early period when the
biological parent entirely filled, entirely sustained one’s universe?
Stafford wastes no time in informing us. To ‘‘know God’’ through the
‘‘Spirit,’’ he declares—and here are the crucial words, ‘‘we must be dependent
on Him’’ (p. 32). We must be born again as His ‘‘small children’’ (p. 40).
We must address Him with the ‘‘babyish terms’’ Abba or ‘‘Daddy’’ (pp. 40, 45).
We must follow the direction of the New Testament and put Him in the
parent’s place, telling Him, ‘‘I love you’’ (p. 45). We must recognize through
the Holy Spirit, ‘‘Who plants this seed of love in us,’’ that God gives us
‘‘everything we need for life’’ (pp. 28, 45). And finally, we must accept our
‘‘dependence’’ upon Him as never-ending, as ‘‘eternal’’ (p. 148). God ‘‘loves
106 Becoming God’s Children
us as His little children,’’ as a ‘‘parent’’ who is willing to ‘‘sacrifice his life’’ for
his offspring, asserts Stafford, and we must never fail to ‘‘remember our utter
dependence upon His care’’ (pp. 56, 143). Can anyone fail to see what we
have here? We have the same magical system of thought and conduct that
we found in this section’s contextual authors. When the worshiper thinks like
a child, acts like a child, approaches his explicitly parental Deity as a small,
needy, dependent child approaches the parental big one who watches over
him—in short, when the worshiper refashions imitatively the primal child-
hood mentation and behavior upon which his actual biological existence is
founded, he triggers the implicit, feeling recollection of both his original, vul-
nerable self and the loving, provisional caregiver who nurtured him toward
his maturity, who mitigated his discomforts and anxieties, who simply kept
him alive in his helpless, defenseless, condition as a neotenous newcomer.
Thus, the worshiper ‘‘knows God’’ through a ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ that is those early,
precious, powerful recollections and longings as they are repositioned out-
wardly (or projectively) into the putative supernatural sphere and then loved
all over again in the exuberance of passionate rediscovery and theological
idealization: God’s love for us is perfect, unconditional, and everlasting.
The worshiper resides in Christ and Christ in the worshiper, forevermore.
Here is a final example, one that takes us to what we might think of as the
outer limits of this particular aspect of magical Christian behavior. Having
seen Jesus in her mind as ‘‘God wrapped in human flesh,’’ having told Him,
‘‘I love You,’’ having cried out to Him ‘‘I open my heart and invite You to
come live within me,’’ and ‘‘I surrender all that I am to Your authority,’’ Anne
Graham Lotz feels herself totally ‘‘filled with the Spirit.’’ She then asks the
reader, in reference to this last item, ‘‘what does that mean?’’ This is her
answer: ‘‘To be filled with His Spirit is to be moment-to-moment surren-
dered to His moment-to-moment control in my life.’’ The result, Lotz goes
on in a remarkable, pivotal utterance, ‘‘is that I am increasingly His
look-alike and His act-alike and His live-alike. . . . My body is His dwelling
place, . . . twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.’’61 Thus does the mag-
ical imitative return to the symbiotic arrangement of the early time, to the
period of ‘‘moment-to-moment control’’ by the all-powerful, all-absorbing
parental presence, harbor the potential simply to blur ego-boundaries away
and to leave the worshiper fading off into the mentalistic Big One of the
putative supernatural sphere. When Lotz declares, ‘‘I am increasingly His
look-alike and His act-alike and His live-alike,’’ we recognize immediately
that her autonomous existence as a grown-up increasingly disappears as she
blends herself perceptually and emotionally into the idealized parental Deity
toward Whom she gravitates through her longing to collapse her separate
The Infantilizing Process 107
status in the world. Lotz doesn’t want to be out there on her own. She wants to
be in the Big One or to have the Big One in her (it amounts to the same thing).
She wants to ‘‘surrender,’’ as she puts it, to His ‘‘moment-to-moment control’’
of her ‘‘life.’’ It is as if Lotz is saying just beneath the surface of her homeopathic
conduct, Rescue me, Jesus, from the burden of my biological being, from the
burden of my separation, my smallness, my mortality. Take me inside You as
Your special child. I can’t make it on my own.
The question arises, as individuals such as Blackaby, and King, and
Stafford, and Lotz, and presumably millions of other Christians go about
their business in a ‘‘moment-to-moment relationship of dependency’’ with
Jesus Who, for every second of the day and night, is in ‘‘control’’ of their lives,
what are they actually doing? How does the Lord’s ‘‘control’’ express itself ?
Is the believer reflecting his ‘‘dependency’’ when, for instance, he checks the
air pressure in his tires, or pays the utility bill, or opens his umbrella in the
rain, or passes the salt at the dinner table? When Blackaby and King offer
us examples of those who let God run the show by mentioning, on the one
hand, Biblical figures such as Moses and Joshua and, on the other hand,
dedicated ministers serving their congregations, we understand at once
(pp. 206, 208). But what about the vast majority of ‘‘ordinary’’ Christian
people who are simply attending to their mundane affairs? How do they fit
in? How do they manifest Christ’s ‘‘moment-to-moment control’’? A valuable
hint resides in Darcey Steinke’s review of Heather King’s autobiographical
volume, Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles toward God.62
A hard-drinking Los Angeles lawyer given to casual love affairs, King
toughs it out for 20 years until one fine day, she discovers herself filled to
the brim with disappointment and disgust. Embarking upon her ‘‘spiritual
journey,’’ she visits numerous places of worship but nothing clicks until she
attends a noonday Mass at St. Basil’s Catholic Church and is, all of a sudden,
‘‘stopped cold.’’ With the light shining ‘‘like honey’’ on the ‘‘teakwood pews,’’
she gazes up at Jesus and feels everything within her striving to ‘‘move toward
Him.’’ King writes, ‘‘I saw that like us, He was in pain and He wasn’t sure
why, whether it would ever end, or what it was for. I saw He’d come to
address the deepest mystery of humankind—the mystery of suffering’’
(p. R2). In one sense her journey is completed, and in another sense it is just
beginning.
Jesus becomes the ‘‘core’’ of King’s existence, the ground of her being; she
feels herself transformed, healed, redeemed through the miracle of His Spirit,
body, and blood. Darcey Steinke declares in a crucial sentence of the review
that takes us to the heart of the naturalistic, psychological analysis we are
fashioning here, ‘‘On the outside, her life doesn’t look very different from
108 Becoming God’s Children
anyone else’s, but on the inside King’s flesh ‘faints for Christ’ ’’ (p. R2).
The point is, the ‘‘moment-to-moment relationship of dependency’’ on Jesus,
the ‘‘moment-to-moment control’’ of one’s life through Christ, has very little
to do in the vast majority of cases with anything other than the way the
Christian feels during his ordinary day-to-day activities. In contrast to Moses
leading the Jews out of Egypt, or the dedicated pastor preaching to his flock,
the ordinary Christian actualizes God’s ‘‘control’’ merely by sensing that God
is there, on the inside, as his daily life goes forward. What one ‘‘faints’’ for as
he cleaves unto the Savior is nothing other than the ‘‘inner companion,’’
as theologian Niebuhr expresses it,63 Who is with one or in one benignly,
caringly, lovingly as one checks his tire pressure, or pays his bills, or passes
the salt at dinner. One’s ‘‘dependency’’ is the sense of being held.
To put it somewhat differently, what Christianity offers its followers, and
what King discovers in the Church of St. Basil, is precisely what one had early
on as one luxuriated securely and endlessly within the original symbiotic
union of the early period when the big one was always there, and the little
one functioned morphologically as a kind of organ of the big one, psycho-
logically in the big one’s body and emotions, the big One’s ‘‘flesh.’’ As I’ve
suggested, one cannot explicitly remember that arrangement but one can feel
its life-altering power when it is cued through Christian thought and practice,
as it is cued one magical day for King when she gazes up at her crucified God.
Where else, after all, might her primal, all-conquering religious devotion
come from, where else but from her own actual experience in the world, her
own life history, her own deep ‘‘core’’? King calls her change a ‘‘divine inter-
vention’’ (p. R2) because like all Christians she can’t see the psychological/
neurological processes behind the event. Jesus opens for King the way of
her return to the Beginning, to the early life of security and loving union that
she knew and internalized into her own mind-brain as a little one, as a ‘‘little
child.’’ Indeed, the whole aim of Christianity is to position the believer back
there again so that the believer might, like King, attach herself to the
orthodox Parent-God with an enthusiasm and tenacity sufficient to endure
for the duration of her earthly existence. All who ask as the helpless ‘‘little
children’’ of the Abba shall receive; all who seek as His ‘‘moment-to-
moment dependents’’ shall find. King’s life ‘‘looks just like anyone else’s’’ on
the outside but on the inside she is ‘‘hooked’’ on her companion (she ‘‘faints’’
for Him); on the inside she enjoys a perpetual ‘‘fix’’ of ‘‘spiritual’’ attachment
to an idealized recollection of her own biological being. It is world without
end, companionship without end: the Beginning (Edenic perfection) becomes
the end, and stays the end. The time of separation and searching is over.
Is there regression in all this? Of course there is. Without regression, and lots
The Infantilizing Process 109
Abide in me, as I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide
in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
I am the vine, ye are the branches; He that abideth in me, and I in him, the
same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
If a man abideth not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and
men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.
(John 15:4–6)
Thus does Jesus offer Himself to his followers, to the members of his flock, to
His newly baptized ‘‘little children’’ as a kind of psychic umbilicus, the origina-
tive root not only of their spiritual fecundity but of their very lives (‘‘I am the
way, the truth, and the life’’ [John 14:6]): those who fail to ‘‘abide in’’ Him, to
attach themselves to Him as the branch attaches itself to the vine, shall wither
up and disappear forever. The newly born ‘‘child’’ of baptismal rite shall
become a dead child, a lifeless heap of ashes, dust to dust. Again and again
in this brief passage Jesus stresses what we have chosen to term the core mag-
ical wish of the Christian religion as a whole, namely, the wish to be in the
Big One and to have the Big One in oneself, as expressed most vividly in
the Eucharist. ‘‘Abide in me,’’ declares Jesus; ‘‘I am the vine . . . ; he that abid-
eth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without
me ye can do nothing’’ (my emphasis)—nothing, that is, except wither up
and perish, as the dependent infant does in the absence of his indispensible
nourishment. Christianity derives its persuasive power from the natural root
of the worshiper’s biological existence, as that existence extends itself through
110 Becoming God’s Children
We have to realize that apart from the vine (Christ), we can do nothing. We are
in Christ—we have been grafted in—but if we attempt to operate independent
of Him, we will not bear fruit. We can’t! . . . Our light will not shine unless we
are plugged in to the energy source [attached].
(pp. 200–201)
Anderson then turns to his own exemplary life in an effort to guide the
reader: ‘‘I try to maintain,’’ he writes,
a constant awareness that God is always present in my life. I begin my day and
start every ministry by declaring my dependency upon the Lord. . . . We must
stay plugged in to the source of our life and make it our ambition to live in such
a way as to please Him.
(pp. 201–2)
symbiotic relationship on which the idea of the Holy Spirit is founded in the
first place, the Reverend Billy Graham discloses it for us in an invaluable pas-
sage: ‘‘ ‘Abide in Me,’ ’’ writes Graham, quoting Scripture, and then, ‘‘by that
is meant we are to have the closest, most intimate relationship with Christ,
with nothing coming between us. . . . Also, this tells us that we can only bear
spiritual fruit if we abide in Christ: ‘Apart from Me you can do nothing’ ’’66
Graham proceeds to declare—and here are the decisive words,
We can see, then, how crucial it is to be filled with the Spirit, and we are
being filled as we abide in Christ, the vine. . . . Cut me off from this vine
and I will wither away and become useless. Without the vine the branch can
do nothing. So it is with our lives. As long as I strain and work to produce
the fruit of the Spirit from within myself, I will end up fruitless and frus-
trated. But as I abide in Christ—as I maintain a close, obedient, dependent
relationship with him—the Holy Spirit works in my life, creating in me the
fruit of the Spirit.
(pp. 242–43)
Clearly then, one feels the Holy Spirit working in his life when one feels him-
self in a close, dependent relationship with his provider, his feeder, his nour-
isher, his vine. As in Eucharistic rite, when boundaries blur, when the
separated biological self conjures up the symbiotic, dependent self of the early
period, when one acts all this out imitatively through his inward, emotional
commitment to Christian teachings, one awakens in one’s own mind-brain
the delicious mnemonic residues of one’s original life-or-death attachment
to the biological caregiver and thus luxuriates in the certainty of Christianity’s
supernatural claims. What the worshiper wants desperately (to be in not out,
to have someone there at all times as Inner Companion) but cannot discover
directly or sufficiently through his own natural existence is magically pro-
vided to him through his religious participations. The Christian who seeks
will certainly find because what it is that he is seeking emerges from his own
head when he indulges himself in specific magical behaviors. As God Speaks:
Devotional advises, ‘‘Put your trust in God. Cry out to Him for a lifeline.
He will meet you right where you are, in the moment of your need.’’67
In other words, postulate faithfully the existence of a supernatural, parental
Big One and then cry out to that Big One as a helpless, dependent, supplicat-
ing little one, and you will receive your lifeline, your cord, your umbilical
attachment, the magical connection that makes you feel all right again,
soothed and reassured as you were soothed and reassured over and over again,
thousands of times, when you cried out during your career as a biological
infant and child. Infantilize yourself, in short, and you will discover once again
112 Becoming God’s Children
through your implicit recollection of your own biological past the security
and comfort you passionately crave.
the decisive words: ‘‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down
his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you’’
(John 15:13–14, my emphasis). In this way, ‘‘abiding’’ in Christ’s ‘‘love,’’
being ‘‘friends’’ with Christ, being able to depend upon Christ from
‘‘moment-to-moment’’ means obeying Christ at all times, doing ‘‘whatsoever’’
He ‘‘commands’’ or else. The Savior’s friendship, the Savior’s love, the Savior’s
bestowal of life upon His devotees is conditional, not unconditional. Let’s
turn that last sentence around to better see its conditional structure: ‘‘If ye
do whatsoever I command you, ye are my friends’’ (my emphasis). Like all
compelling sectarian/cultic leaders, like all narcissistic personalities in the
grip of their own putative divinity, their own unique grasp of all truth and
all right as they place themselves directly at the center of the universe, the
‘‘good shepherd’’ Jesus (John 10:14) lets His ‘‘sheep’’ know the score: do my
bidding or out you go. You must get along with each other and prove your-
selves willing to die for the cause, or I reject you; I am no longer your ‘‘friend,’’
your ‘‘vine,’’ your source of life and being. The extent to which such condi-
tional commitment enhances the process of infantilization is considerable.
When the godly Big One commands the ‘‘little child’’ to do exactly as He
says or He won’t ‘‘love’’ him anymore, won’t be his ‘‘friend’’ anymore (his
enemy, then?), the Big One awakens in the little one the primal anxiety
of the early period, the anxiety of separation and loss, abandonment and iso-
lation, the sickening prospect of being out there, entirely on one’s own, with-
out the support and affection that comprise the little one’s entire symbiotic
universe. Has not the Christian been baptized, or confirmed, or reborn? Is
He not Christ’s little child, and is Christ not his newly discovered Abba,
replacing explicitly the biological caregiver (Matt. 10:35)? Does he not cry
out routinely to his all-powerful Lord in a petitionary, supplicatory state of
helplessness and submission? Is he not continuously asking in the hope of
continuously receiving? Does he not regularly go into the Big One’s body
and vice versa through Eucharistic rite? Does he not exist, now, in a state of
‘‘moment-to-moment dependency’’ upon his nourishing vine, his Creator,
his Savior, without Whom ‘‘He can do nothing,’’ not even remain existent?
And might all this be taken away, reversed, negated? Might Jesus reject His
‘‘little child’’ if His little child is not ‘‘good,’’ dutiful, controllable, and obedi-
ent? True, Jesus tells His followers in certain places that He will never ‘‘leave’’
them (John 14:18), and the New Testament echoes this promise forcefully
through Paul’s Epistles (Rom. 8:38), but this only deepens the infantilizing
process we’re exploring here.
I mean, by playing it both ways, by ambiguously controlling its devotees,
Christianity exposes its ‘‘little children’’ to something all children experience
114 Becoming God’s Children
at one time or another as they develop from the primal stages of the early
period (years 1–3) toward the subsequent stages of early childhood
(years 3–5), namely, the ‘‘bad object,’’ the ambivalent or dichotomous quality
of the caregiver’s loving ministrations, the two-sided nature of the parent’s
devotion, the big one’s capacity to both succor and threaten the little one
in his or her care. On the one hand, the big one says, I love you and will
always love you; on the other hand, the big one says, be good or you’re out!
Here is the perfect formula for tightening the little one’s anxious grip on his
benefactor. The more the child is threatened with something akin to Jesus’s
words ‘‘If you do whatsoever I command,’’ the more desperately does the little
one cling to the big one’s neck, or thigh. Within the homeopathic, magical
world of Christian behavior, such dichotomous ministration translates quite
straightforwardly into more regression, more implicit mnemonic arousal of
the early time, more affective sensations of dependency, all of which lead,
in turn or cyclically, to more control, more negation of one’s own will, and
more obedience to the purveyors of the specific religious code, the religious
doctrine, the religious outlook as a whole. Indeed, the posture of unquestioning
obedience as it is associated with the centerpiece of love is capable of arousing
the entire magical system of imitative compliance, infantilization in short.
As the little one is apprehensive or even frightened on the inside, so is he
prone to do the bidding of the Savior, to adopt and to stick with his own
sorry self-identification as a helpless, needy dependent who ‘‘can do nothing’’
on his own.
I’m not suggesting for a moment, of course, that such compliant behavior
does not have its positive, rewarding, adaptational aspect. The vast majority
of human beings underwent, and implicitly recall, the basic, primal pleasure
of mama’s continuous, unwavering control, of going about securely in
daddy’s directional care, hand-in-hand with the guiding big one. In fact, such
control, such direction, and the feeling of security they engender are fre-
quently mistaken in maturity for love, with disastrous consequences. Because
the adult commander’s commands are unconsciously linked in the mind of
the subordinate partner to the caregiver’s dominant role during life’s opening
stages, the vulnerable adult gets hopelessly lost in what turns out to be a dan-
gerous, abusive relationship. One strives to behave as a grown-up when one
functions inside as a helpless, dependent child. We recognize an offshoot of
this emotive configuration in Christianity past and present when the follower
of Christ becomes rigid, severe, compulsive, fanatical, even self-punitive in
his obedient devotion to the Redeemer. Do not the history books offer us a
motley crowd of harsh inquisitors, determined self-flagellators, and skeletal
ascetics? Do we not have at least a hint of all this here, in the New Testament,
The Infantilizing Process 115
as Jesus suggests to his devotees that they be willing to die for the cause, just as
He is willing to die for them?
Everywhere in the literature of the Christian religion such infantilizing
emotional patterns play themselves out. Blackaby and King commence
their section titled ‘‘His Will Is Always Best’’ with the assertion (from
I John 4:16) ‘‘God is love.’’68 They follow this immediately with the startling
equivocation, ‘‘this does not say that God loves, though He does love with
perfect, unconditional love’’ (p. 17). Scripture declares, they continue,
making matters worse, that ‘‘God’s very nature is love. God can never func-
tion contrary to His own nature [love]. Never in your life will God express
His will toward you except that it is an expression of perfect love. He can’t!’’
(p. 17). Surely at this point one has the right to ask, what’s going on? God
is love [noun], yet doesn’t necessarily love [love as a verb]. However, God will
never ‘‘express’’ [verb] anything toward you ‘‘except’’ perfect love. But if that
is the case, then He certainly loves [love as verb], does He not? A moment
later, in the next series of sentences, Blackaby and King inform us that God
is prone to direct His ‘‘wrath’’ toward those who don’t ‘‘obey’’ Him, those
who rebel and sin. Still, He loves us so much ‘‘that He gave us His only
begotten Son, and by this we know love’’ (p. 17). Indeed, God’s ‘‘punish-
ments’’ themselves are based on ‘‘love,’’ just as His ‘‘commands’’ are ‘‘for your
good.’’ As the big ones used to tell us when we were little guys and gals, God
‘‘knows what is best for you’’ (pp. 18–19). The upshot is clear: ‘‘If you love
Him,’’ you will obey Him! If you do not obey Him, you do not really love
him (p. 22, my italics for that old cliché of manipulative parenting). You must
‘‘respond to Him in simple, childlike trust,’’ and as you do so ‘‘your life will
be fulfilling. You will never have to sense an emptiness or lack of purpose.
He always fills your life with Himself ’’ [separation overcome through the
inner companion; symbiosis restored] (p. 25). When you declare, ‘‘I have
no will of my own,’’ and view yourself as ‘‘God’s obedient child,’’ you will
‘‘know’’ the ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ is ‘‘speaking to you,’’ is ‘‘touching your heart,’’ is
‘‘leading’’ you to a ‘‘love relationship’’ with the Almighty [implicit recollec-
tion of one’s primal experience as a helpless little one] (p. 173). Can even
the most dubious, resistant reader fail to see what is occurring here? Blackaby
and King’s mixed message, namely, that God ‘‘is’’ perfect, endless, uncondi-
tional ‘‘love’’ yet responds with ‘‘wrath’’ when His followers are disobedient,
recalcitrant, ‘‘bad,’’ echoes precisely Christ’s conditional injunction, ‘‘Ye are
my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command’’ (John 15:14). The Big One is
there, just as he was there early on when the little one navigated the behavioral
challenges of his fresh biological existence, yet the Big One’s presence, love,
support, provision, and ministration may not be there, may no longer be there,
116 Becoming God’s Children
if the little one’s obedience, the little one’s submission and will-lessness, is not
evident at all times. The nourishing ‘‘vine’’ nourishes only when the
‘‘branches’’ manifest their unqualified dependency; or, to express the matter
in the light of Christianity’s homeopathic, imitative core, the religious magic
works only when the worshiper acts out the essential nature of his early,
developmental interactions with the caregiver.
God will never ‘‘leave me,’’ never ‘‘forsake me,’’ asserts Anderson in his vol-
ume Who I Am in Christ.69 Then, adding a crucial rider, a crucial afterthought
to the initial, comforting assertions, Anderson declares, ‘‘As long as I obey God,
I will live in harmony with Him’’ (p. 27). Backing this up with the words
of Jesus Himself, Anderson quotes the New Testament as follows: ‘‘If anyone
loves me, he will obey my teaching’’ (John 14:23). Here we have again the
manipulative, conditional style of parenting, of controlling the ‘‘little children,’’
that we discovered in Blackaby and King a few sentences earlier: Are you
naughty? Are you bad? Are you rebellious and disobedient? Well, that proves
you don’t love me! To make his position perfectly clear, Anderson treats us to
this infantilizing ditty, the sort of rhyme one might put to kindergartners:
Thus, ‘‘obedience’’ becomes the condition upon which the ‘‘little child’s’’ hap-
piness rests. ‘‘I come to You as Your child,’’ cries Anderson in heartfelt suppli-
cation; ‘‘I no longer put any confidence in myself,’’ he pitiably maintains;
‘‘my confidence is in You. . . . I now accept myself as a child of God’’
(p. 29). Employing for us the crucial notion of ‘‘abiding in’’ Jesus (John 15:3)
from which the thesis of this section originally arose, Anderson notes in a pas-
sage titled ‘‘What God Requires’’ that only ‘‘the one who keeps His com-
mandments abides in Him and He in him.’’ Indeed, pronounces Anderson,
‘‘abiding is obedience’’ (p. 209, my emphasis). The conclusion is inescapable:
one’s submission, one’s will-lessness, one’s dependency, one’s obedience to the
Big One means in, means attachment, means holding, means security, and to
turn the coin over, one’s obedience to the Big One prevents separation, pre-
vents loss, prevents betrayal and abandonment, prevents the very problem or
issue or preoccupation with which Anderson opened his discussion, ‘‘Will
God leave Me?’’ (p. 27). We’ve come full circle then: the Christian’s ultimate
concern is separation, being out as opposed to in, in the body of the Big One,
the feeder, the vine, the supernatural umbilicus rooted neurologically in the
The Infantilizing Process 117
I feel that all the values the Lord has laid down for us are really for our own ben-
efit. And if we think that we want to do something contrary to those values, well,
that’s fine, but we’re only going to be hurting ourselves if we give in. God knows
the future, and He knows why He set down certain rules. I feel that the Lord is
just. Like He says, He’s our Father and He’s looking out for us. So long as I can
remember that God’s rules are only for my good and for my own happiness,
and that He knows better than I do, then they are easy to adhere to.71
the essence of sin is self-will—placing ourselves at the center of our lives instead
of Christ. The way to be filled—controlled and dominated—by the Spirit is to
place Christ at the center of our lives, instead of self. This only happens as we
submit to Him—as we allow Him to become Lord of our lives.
(p. 140)
The Infantilizing Process 119
This indicates what the real conflict is in the heart of every true believer. The
flesh wants one thing and the Spirit wants another. The black dog and the white
dog are often fighting. As long as there is not the surrender of mind and body
every moment of the day, the old nature will assert itself.
(p. 103)
Graham spells out what he has in mind explicitly when he refers to ‘‘any kind
of impurity in thought or deed, . . . lust, . . . modern films, pornographic liter-
ature, . . . wantonness or debauchery, . . . lewdness and sensuality of any kind’’
(p. 106). He sums things up with, ‘‘By faith we turn over our lives totally and
completely and without reservation to the Holy Spirit’’ (p. 113). This is,
of course, a well-flogged, inescapable, even notorious theme in Chris-
tianity past and present, as witnessed most famously perhaps by Friedrich
Nietzsche’s lively tract The Antichrist in which the author pens what he calls
the ‘‘eternal indictment of Christianity’’ as ‘‘against life itself,’’ as ‘‘contemptuous’’
of ‘‘the body . . . through the concept of sin.’’73 Nietzsche asks in his best
rhetorical style,
Really, how can one put a book in the hands of children and women which
contains the dictum: ‘‘to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife,
and let every woman have her own husband. . . . It is better to marry than to
burn.’’? And how can one be a Christian as long as the notion of the immaculate
conception Christianizes, that is, dirties, the origin of man?
(pp. 642–43)
Christianity produce the ‘‘little children’’ it requires when its prospective con-
verts or struggling practitioners are carried away by their aroused and eager
sexual organs? People who are mating or thumbing through pornographic
magazines are hardly the helpless babies Christianity needs to fill its ranks
of will-less, obedient worshipers. When Nietzsche writes elsewhere that the
‘‘priest’’ leads ‘‘humanity by the nose’’ through the concept of ‘‘morality’’
(p. 621), he fails to take us to the heart of the matter: it is not ‘‘morality’’ in
some sexual sense that Christianity ultimately advocates; it is obedience,
will-lessness, submission, control; it is these precisely that reside at the foun-
dation from which the notion of ‘‘morality’’ arises. Accordingly, Christianity
does not condemn ‘‘life’’ or the ‘‘body.’’ It condemns grown-up ‘‘life,’’
grown-up biology, grown-up participation in the world. It lovingly promul-
gates infantile life, infantile biology, infantile participation in the world because
in the process of infantilization it discovers not merely the power to control
but the potential to gratify its followers who will rest fully content only in
the Savior, only in the regressive, symbiotic merger with the Big One, only
in the magical, homeopathic return to the period in which being separate,
being out there on one’s own, has not yet occurred. As in every sphere of
human conduct with which it concerns itself, Christianity’s aim in respect
to sexuality is to play it both ways, to deal over here with the ordinary,
grown-up men and women it requires in its worldly ranks in order to gain
fresh followers from each generation, and over there with the regressed, needy
‘‘little children’’ it strives to produce through its infantilizing doctrines
and rites, its postulation of an explicitly parental Deity upon Whom its
submissive, obedient devotees must entirely depend.
From the perspective of the last few paragraphs, including the brief discus-
sion of Nietzsche’s famous treatise, we begin to spy the underlying quality of
what we might think of as the Devout Christian Practitioner, the dedicated
Christian soul who has rendered himself or herself up to the Church’s teach-
ings, to the Way of the Savior, to the religious essence of the inspirational
creed. And what we behold in our mind’s eye as we picture this, as we recall
perhaps the sweet, compassionate face of the Christian expositor on televi-
sion, the softly smiling mouth, the concerned, gentle eyes, the exalted, sooth-
ing message of mercy and forgiveness and love, is not a hater of life and the
body, a despiser of the world and the flesh, but an infantilized human being
who has fallen under the spell of a cultic, magical system of thought and con-
duct dedicated to the notion that all men and women are created as the ‘‘little
children’’ of an omnipotent, infallible, invisible Parent-God, a Big One Who
commands that His devotees exist submissively as little ones for all their days
on earth and for all their eternities in heaven. We have in the Devout
122 Becoming God’s Children
‘‘It wasn’t an argument that saved me,’’ declares Mark Chironna on the
Trinity Broadcasting Network as he recounts his voyage from sin to salvation;
it was ‘‘the love of a Savior Who would never let me go.’’75 How many times
has one heard something exactly like this enunciated on the radio or the tele-
vision set, or expressed in a devotional handbook or pamphlet? Nor does the
love of God have only to be received, recorded, and accepted as there, to work
its homeopathic magic. The affective, memorial system operates equally well
when the worshiper’s devotion is openly affirmed, when the worshiper says to
his Parent-God as he said over and over again through his sounds and words
and gestures to his biological mommy and daddy as a little one, ‘‘I love you.’’
This is, of course, why Christians are encouraged to tell the Big One of their
love, to lavish that love upon Him, to preserve, in short, the emotional foun-
dation of their own biological lives so that it may serve as the magical founda-
tion of their putative ‘‘spiritual’’ lives. To actualize our love for God, states
Stafford, we must express it openly, all the time. We must say to the Lord,
‘‘Father, I don’t know what this means or where it will lead, but I have to
tell you I love you.’’76 When we do this, ‘‘when that step is taken,’’ claims
Stafford, ‘‘something happens.’’ We hear ‘‘the sound of the door closing
behind us. We are in this relationship now. There is no way to back out. . . .
The courtship is over. We belong to him’’ (pp. 45–46). It is the ‘‘Holy Spirit,’’
the ‘‘Person,’’ declares Stafford, Who
plants this seed of love in us. By Him we cry ‘‘Abba, Father.’’ The Spirit himself
testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children (Romans 8:15–16). There is
nothing irrational about calling out to God as ‘‘Daddy’’: we are like small
children before God. But only the spirit enables us to love Him for it.
(p. 45)
In this way, in this magical way rooted neurologically in our implicit memo-
rial structure, ‘‘we go in and are never expected to back out. Why would we?
Inside, we find love and joy. In Christ, through the Holy Spirit, we live in
love’’ (p. 54). Surely the gist of our theoretic, psychological position in this
book as a whole is pellucid at precisely this juncture: the aim of the Christian
religion is to find one’s way back in, to be in again, not out, to be safe and
secure inside the body of the loving Big One, not out there in that anxious,
scary world of separation, smallness, and death. There is no need to cavil over
the exact ordering of the implicit mnemonic processes that trigger the magi-
cal goings-on in their entirety, the forging of the alternative, homeopathic
identity of ‘‘little one’’ that exists alongside one’s ordinary biological nature.
To hear of God’s love may be enough to awaken the Person of the Holy Spirit;
or the implicit recollection of the early period as it is aroused by a variety of
The Infantilizing Process 125
ritualistic and doctrinal cues such as baptism, prayer, the Eucharist, or specific
key images discoverable in Scripture (the umbilical vine, for example) may be
sufficient to prompt the avowal of the believer’s ‘‘love of God,’’ an avowal that
will reinforce through a kind of neurological chain reaction the unconscious
affective memory of the loving biological exchanges that stand directly
behind the fashioning of the Holy Spirit itself as an integral aspect of the
tripartite Godhead. ‘‘God, who is altogether person, expects and demands
that avowal of love,’’ writes Stafford, and then, ‘‘He also gives us vows of
His own’’ (p. 54). The Holy Spirit exists and functions at both ends of this
dynamic, mnemonic continuum.
‘‘We cannot do anything to qualify for unconditional and voluntary love,’’
asserts Anderson in his volume Who I Am in Christ; ‘‘we labor under the false
assumption that if we live perfectly everybody will accept us, while there was
One who lived His life perfectly, and everybody rejected Him.’’77 Anderson
goes on to declare,
I know who I am now. I’m a child of God, and the basis of my acceptance is in
Him, not in man. . . . Understanding and receiving God’s unconditional love is
foundational for all future growth. We don’t have to do things so God will
someday accept us. We are accepted by God completely as we are.
(pp. 21–22)
And then, relying on the terminology that calls to mind explicitly the early
stages of our human existence from which the magical potential of all this
directly springs, Anderson states,
When you know who you are in Christ, you no longer need to be threatened by
people or compete with them, because you are already secure and loved. . . .
Like babies, we are newborn in Christ, and we are to long for the pure milk
of the Word. . . . Let me encourage you as a newborn babe in Christ to long
for the pure milk of the Word.
(p. 23)
Anderson concludes his devotional treatise with this prayer to the Almighty:
‘‘I love You with all my heart, soul and strength. You are the Lord of the
universe, and the Lord of my life, now and forever.’’ For the reader he has,
‘‘Can you be content with His will in any situation? Yes, because He is there
with you, and you are in Him’’ (pp. 276–77). Surely the reader, with that,
will be inclined to breathe, Amen.
Through this rich, lush imagery of loving parental care and infantile feed-
ing and bonding we are taken once again to the heart of Christian magic, to
126 Becoming God’s Children
the way in which the religion’s supernatural edifice reawakens the strong,
originative time when the devoted biological caregiver was there for the help-
less, dependent little one, when the newcomer’s very survival hinged directly
upon remaining in orbit, in the gravitational field of the primary provider.
‘‘There, there,’’ says Anderson’s book in effect to its readers, to the ‘‘newborn
babes’’ taking in the ‘‘milk’’ of Jesus’s Word, ‘‘everything is going to be all
right. Don’t fret. You’re not out there anymore. You’re back in, back again in
the arms of the Big One who loves you unconditionally and will never let
you go.’’ Can we not appreciate from this perspective the full psychological
significance of the following definition of ‘‘Heaven’’ in that ever-popular
paperback volume Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul: ‘‘Heaven is a great
big hug that lasts forever’’?78 Here is Christianity in nine simple words that
boil down straightforwardly to the alternate, magical reality in which Chris-
tians choose to position themselves as they cleave unto the word: perfect
loving security upon the bosom of the Parent-God, the Abba-Daddy and the
tender Son who want nothing more than to love their little ones to pieces,
personally and forever. How could the vast, mysterious, surrounding world
possibly appear more benign than this to a vulnerable primate whose limita-
tions and mortality are always resounding in his mature, symbol-making mind?
What is the Christian’s ‘‘secret to happiness,’’ asks Rev. Schuller who chooses
to answer through one of his parishioners (Lisa) whose following words he
considers to be ‘‘psychologically and theologically sound’’:
[Happiness comes] from knowing that I am loved no matter what, and that I
don’t have to perform and I don’t have to be a good person. I don’t even have
to follow the Lord’s laws to be loved. It’s just total grace and it’s all mercy. It’s
knowing that I’m loved just because He created me. So if I blow it, I blow it,
but Jesus is still standing here with open arms. And if I do good He’s standing
there to commend me. When you know you’re totally accepted for who you
are, it’s a lot easier to be yourself with others. If they accept me, that’s great,
but if they don’t that’s okay too, because then I’ll just run home to Daddy—to
Jesus, to my Heavenly Father.79
during the course of which his existence transpired within the organic, emo-
tional field of ministering other? Listen again to the key phrases: ‘‘I’m loved
just because he created me.’’ There is only one natural, empiric precedent
for that sentiment. ‘‘I’ll just run home to Daddy—to Jesus, to my Heavenly
Father.’’ Surely the reader can see the early, developmental period from which
those words derive. ‘‘I’m loved no matter what.’’ Here is the positive, inner
conviction harbored by people whose parents did a reasonably decent job
during the formative years. As for the employment of the image of ‘‘home’’
specifically, its widespread usage in the literature of Christianity warrants
further consideration.
Saxophonist Ron Brown joins Pat Robertson on the 700 Club in
May 2006 to recount for the television audience both his descent into the
snake pit of drug addiction and his ascent into the refuge of faith. From mari-
juana to cocaine to heroin, Ron becomes hopelessly addicted until one day, in
the midst of suicidal ruminations, a ‘‘miracle’’ occurs. Somewhere in his tor-
mented mind Ron begins to hear the voice of his Savior, Jesus Christ, saying
to him again and again, ‘‘You are my child. Come home to me.’’ This is the
turning point. Rendering his life up to the Lord, Ron ‘‘goes home’’ at last.
After listening intently to Ron’s story, Pat turns to his viewers with the words,
‘‘This is the journey home for which each of us was created.’’80 A year or so
later, in August 2007, Robertson is once again ministering to his television
audience. As he approaches the conclusion of his inspirational message he
maintains with a concerned yet tender expression and with a firm yet sooth-
ing voice that the Gospel’s ultimate message is not ‘‘avoid sin,’’ or ‘‘follow
the rules,’’ or ‘‘prepare for heaven,’’ but simply this: ‘‘come home.’’81
Let’s keep firmly in mind as we go that Jesus’s devotees do not ‘‘come home’’
in just any old way, anymore than they pray in just any old way. The French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard notes that ‘‘all really inhabited space bears the
essence of the notion of home,’’82 to which I would immediately add that every
notion of home bears the essence of the notion of mother, father, parent, or
some combination thereof. Coming home for the Christian is operationally
intertwined with the Christian having become God’s ‘‘little child,’’ newly born
through baptismal rite, attached to the umbilical ‘‘Vine,’’ feeding on the body
and blood of the Redeemer, taking in the ‘‘milk’’ of the ‘‘Word,’’ existing in a
state of ‘‘moment-to-moment dependency’’ on the Big One, praying regularly
as the needy offspring of the omnipotent Deity, obediently performing ‘‘what-
soever’’ the Big One ‘‘commands’’ for the filial Christian’s ‘‘own good,’’ and
looking forward to the endless, loving ‘‘hug’’ that is commensurate with Chris-
tianity’s death-denying notion of ‘‘heaven,’’ eternal union with the original
Parent-Creator.83 As Lisa puts it in Schuller’s psychologically and theologically
128 Becoming God’s Children
this is reversed: he is the context out of which his family must spring. . . .
‘‘Pointing to his disciples, he said, Here are my mother and my brother’’
(Matt. 12:49). Paul, following this example, called Christians the adopted chil-
dren of God. He also called the church the ‘‘body of Christ.’’ In the church we
The Infantilizing Process 129
find the down-to-earth focus of Jesus’ personality. Jesus is invisible to us, but
through his family [his body/church] he makes himself known.85
Stafford declares that ‘‘those who quickly become participants in Jesus’ family
grow in faith’’ and live
active, fruitful lives. The reason for this vitality is obvious, if we think about
faith as a personal relationship to Jesus. His flesh and blood carry more of his
personality than a set of bloodless ideas. If we know Jesus’ family, we are not
far from knowing Jesus as a person.
(p. 83)
Jesus’s ‘‘little children’’: ‘‘ ‘With love and solicitude mother Church already
embraces them as her own’ ’’ (p. 319). Thomas Wolfe maintained in his
famous novelistic title that You Can’t Go Home Again; and when he did so,
he meant really, not magically. Within the realm of Christian magic you can
leave home and not leave home, you can say goodbye to ‘‘daddy’’ and then
run home to ‘‘daddy,’’ you can separate from the matrix and not separate
from the matrix, all at the same time as time holds both the present and
the past. That indeed is Christianity, through the stirrings of the Spirit: into
the body of Christ through the wound in His side; into His body forever to
stay as His ‘‘little child’’ of love. Such is the inward shape of what we’ve
chosen to call here infantilization.
Were we obligated to suggest the most compelling link in the overall mag-
ical setup, it would have to be, from the neurobiological angle at least, the
link between love and the reversal of separation—by which I mean the sepa-
ration of the child from the parent and the final separation of the individual
from the world and everyone in it through death. No facet of human exis-
tence drives the magic of Christianity more relentlessly than separation in
both of these fundamental senses. Indeed, the religion as a whole must be
regarded as a mythic veiling and finally a denying of separation’s role in our
lives. Into the loving body of Christ means into the permanent shelter, into
the permanent security, of symbiotic interfusion with the immortal, parental
Big One. Faithful, bona fide Christians, then, are allowed to play it both
ways: they put the invisible Deity in the parent’s place and thus move away
from biological union with its threats of incestuous dependency; at the same
time, as they gravitate toward the Deity, they become ‘‘little children’’ again;
they find the early period again; they gratify their thirst for infantile depen-
dency again, feeding on the body, the Vine, of the umbilical Provider.
Psychologically, Christians are like crabs, moving forward and backward all
at the same time. Let’s sample a vivid, characteristic instance of mythological
veiling and comprehensive denial.87
In ‘‘Becoming One of God’s Children,’’ The Watchtower notes ‘‘how family
members rejoice when they find one another after being separated and lost!
The Bible describes how humans were tragically separated from God’s family.
It also tells how they are now joyfully united.’’88 Here’s the specific ‘‘story’’ that
veils the biological realities and sets the stage for wholesale supernatural denial:
When God’s first human son, Adam, rebelled, . . . the human race was painfully
separated from its loving Father and Creator [the developmental separation of
the child from the parent, internalized implicitly into the memorial system during
years 1–4]. This is because through his rebellion, Adam forfeited for himself and
The Infantilizing Process 131
his yet unborn offspring the privilege of being children of God. Through his
servant Moses, God described the consequences of what had happened: ‘‘They
have acted ruinously on their own part; they are not God’s children, the defect
is their own.’’ The defect, or sinful nature, alienated humans from God, who is
holy and perfect in every way. In a sense, then, mankind became lost, father-
less.—Ephesians 2:12. [‘‘In a sense, then’’ marks the struggle of the myth maker
to turn the story toward our own biological development: ‘‘lost, fatherless,’’ etc.]
(p. 8)
To emphasize the extent, of mankind’s isolation, the Bible refers to those out-
side God’s family as ‘‘enemies.’’ (Romans 5:8, 10) Separated from God, human-
kind has suffered under the harsh rule of Satan and the deadly effects of
inherited sin and imperfection [death as a biological reality of human exis-
tence]. Can sinful humans become part of God’s family [enter the unconscious
longing for resumption of primal symbiotic interaction with a parental pres-
ence]? Can imperfect creatures [separate and anxious] become children
of God in the fullest sense, the way Adam and Eve were before they sinned?
[In other words, can the biological facts of human existence be reversed
so as to create a world free of primal anxiety, primal terror, the brute animal
detection of separation, smallness or vulnerability, and death?]
(p. 9)
The Watchtower forges ahead this way in a section titled perfectly for our
purposes ‘‘Gathering Separated Children’’; note the tie between love and
separation’s magical defeat:
Lovingly, God made provisions for the benefit of imperfect people who love
him. (I Corinthians 2:9) The apostle Paul explains: ‘‘God was by means of
Christ reconciling a world to himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses,’’
(2 Corinthians 5:19) God provides Jesus Christ as a ransom for our sins.
(Matt. 20:28) With appreciation, the apostle John wrote: ‘‘See what sort of love
the Father has given us, so that we should be called children of God.’’
(I John 3:1) Thus, a way was opened for obedient mankind to become part of
God’s family once again. . . . All who respond to God’s love will be progressively
restored to the perfection of life that Adam lost [union with the Creator, the
perfect symbiosis of the early time, or the Garden]. Even the dead will be raised
[the denial of death]. Thus God will fulfill his promise.
(p. 9)
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which
is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
(Rom. 8:38–39)
special, immortal darling, resting his head on the bosom of the Big One Who
is eternally present, eternally there.
As we would expect, everywhere in the literature of Christianity this grati-
fying, transformational ‘‘news’’ is proclaimed. ‘‘We will never be cast away by
our heavenly Father,’’ declares Anderson. ‘‘He has promised to never leave us
or forsake us. Let me encourage you as a newborn babe in Christ to long for
the pure milk of the Word’’ (p. 23). ‘‘It is thrilling to note,’’ writes Graham,
that Jesus says believers will not be left alone. Through the Holy Spirit whom
He and the Father sent, He will never leave us or forsake us (Heb. 13:5). He will
remain with every believer right to the end. This thought has encouraged me a
thousand times in these dark days when satanic forces are at work in so many
parts of the world.90
There have been times in my spiritual journey when my feelings have crowded
out any awareness of God’s presence in my life. I have felt abandoned by Him.
At such times of weakness I have needed a clear vision of Jesus—a vision that
He has given me through His Word, which distinctly promises, ‘‘Never will
I leave you; never will I forsake you.’’
And what does Jesus say to Lotz when He is ‘‘there,’’ when he is ‘‘present’’
once again ‘‘in her heart’’? It goes like this: ‘‘ ‘I love you.’ ’’91 The faithful
Christian, asserts theologian Niebuhr,
trusts in the loyalty of the Transcendent One and in His power, being certain in
his mind that nothing can separate men from the love of God. He trusts God
for himself, for his nation, for mankind. This trust is wholly personal. He has
the assurance that God will never forsake him, that God seeks and saves the
lost.92
Thus are we back again through Christ to the ‘‘lost sheep’’ of ‘‘Israel.’’
Surely the reader can discern in the foregoing citations Christianity’s magical
system of thought and the central role of separation therein. Everything is at
hand. The worshiper becomes the Parent-God’s ‘‘newborn babe’’ (Anderson),
and as he does so, he gravitates mnemonically toward the early period of his life
and the implicit, feeling recollection of the big ones who ‘‘encouraged’’ him in
the beginning (Graham’s ‘‘Holy Spirit’’); he feels their loving presence as they
whisper ‘‘I love you’’ to him (Lotz); and he feels their reliability, their trustwor-
thiness, and the inward assurance that they will never ‘‘forsake’’ him, let him go
134 Becoming God’s Children
******
Let’s move on, now, to the second part of this central chapter. There, I’ll
strive to expand my neuropsychological analyses into what I hope will
become a fruitful evolutionary view of the manner in which Christianity
works in the mind and in the body. Where the behavior of human beings is
concerned, the neuropsychological and the evolutional proceed inseparably,
and it’s time we started putting them together.
Notes
1. Joseph Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liquori, MO: Liquori
Publications, 1994), p. 312.
2. Robert H. Schuller, The Be (Happy) Attitudes (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1985),
pp. 115, 227.
3. Neil T. Anderson, Who I Am in Christ (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1984), p. 9.
4. Tim Stafford, Knowing the Face of God (Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress,
1986), p. 50.
5. Throughout this book, as stated in the notes to Chapter 1, I’m using the King
James Version of the Bible.
6. See note 5 above.
7. G. P. Fisher, A History of Christian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1978), p. 348.
8. Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church, pp. 330–31.
9. See note 3 above.
10. Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
11. Ibid., p. 123.
12. Romano Guardini, Prayer in Practice, trans. L. Loewenstein-Wertheim
(London: Burns and Oates, 1957), p. 209.
The Infantilizing Process 135
13. Ole Hallesby, Prayer, trans. C. Carlsen (Leicester, England: Intervarsity Press,
1979), p. 24.
14. C. H. Spurgeon, quoted in Richard S. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True
Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 179.
15. Patrick Cotter, How to Pray (Boca Raton, FL: Globe Communications,
1999), p. 13.
16. James Pruitt, Healed by Prayer (New York: Avon Books, 2000), p. 1.
17. Walter A. Elwell, ed., Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), p. 622.
18. Timothy Jones, The Art of Prayer: A Simple Guide (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1997), p. 108.
19. Huldrych Zwingli, quoted in Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and
Psychology of Religion, p. 271.
20. Elwell, Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, p. 622.
21. Hallesby, Prayer, p. 22.
22. Guardini, Prayer in Practice, p. 63.
23. Gordon Lindsay, Prayer That Moves Mountains (Dallas: Christ for the Nations,
1996), p. 37.
24. Joshua David Stone, Soul Psychology (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999),
p. 168.
25. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, p. 179.
26. Cotter, How to Pray, p. 14.
27. Jones, The Art of Prayer, p. 110.
28. Larry Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine
(San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993), pp. 100–101.
29. Stephen Winward, Teach Yourself to Pray (London: English Universities Press,
1961), p. 46.
30. George Arthur Buttrick, So We Believe, So We Pray (New York: Abingdon-
Cokesbury, 1994), p. 30.
31. See Tony Castle, ed., The New Book of Christian Prayers (New York: Crossroad,
1986), p. 61.
32. Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 75.
33. Cited in Leonard Roy Frank, ed., Quotationary (New York: Random House,
1998), p. 636.
34. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought
Known (London: Free Association Books, 1987), pp. 13, 33.
35. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Library of
America, [1902] 1987), p. 69.
36. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object, p. 33.
37. Terry Lynn Taylor, The Alchemy of Prayer (Tiburon, CA: H. J. Kramer, Inc.,
1996), p. 15.
38. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object, pp. 14–15.
136 Becoming God’s Children
39. The terms Holy Ghost and Holy Spirit were interchangeable among
Christians until the inception of the twentieth century when Ghost was dropped
because of its associations with magic and the paranormal.
40. It is worth noting here that Billy Graham considers the personhood of the
Holy Spirit to be a mysterious and ‘‘terribly difficult subject.’’ See Billy Graham,
The Holy Spirit (New York: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1978), p. 10.
41. See note 30 above.
42. Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 334.
43. Stafford, Knowing the Face of God, p. 94.
44. Cited in Fisher, A History of Christian Doctrine, p. 321.
45. Perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future scientific experiment will allow us
to see the memorial regions of the brain light up when Christians are suffused with
the putative Holy Spirit by virtue of their participation in Christian thought and
practice.
46. See John 16:7 for the Holy Spirit as ‘‘the Comforter.’’
47. Fisher, A History of Christian Doctrine, p. 406. Interestingly, on p. 409, Fisher
suggests that the modern scientific view of matter as energy may eventually obviate
the controversy over the nature of the bread and the wine. If the bread and the wine
are Christ, then His energy is in them; if they represent Christ, then they may, as
energy, still hold Him. Energy, in this way of thinking, is very close to spirit.
48. For the Church as Christ’s body, see Graham, The Holy Spirit, p. 73.
The ‘‘body of Christ,’’ holds Graham, ‘‘is the Church.’’ See also I Cor. 6:15 and
12:11–12.
49. Gerhard O. Forde, Where God Meets Man: Luther’s Down-to-Earth Approach to
the Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972), p. 87.
50. H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 104.
51. Stafford, Knowing the Face of God, p. 94.
52. Louise Kendall and R. T. Kendall, eds., Great Christian Prayers (London: Hod-
der and Stoughton, 2000).
53. See Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church, pp. 355, 516.
54. Maurice Wiles, ‘‘What Christians Believe,’’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of
Christianity, ed. John Mc Manners (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),
pp. 553–71. My citation is on p. 570.
55. Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 484.
56. Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King, Experiencing God (Nashville, TN:
Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1998), pp. 25, 30.
57. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, God Will Make a Way (Nashville, TN:
Integrity Publishers, 2002), p. 98.
58. Schuller, Be (Happy) Attitudes, p. 17.
59. Anderson, Who I Am in Christ, p. 9.
60. Stafford, Knowing the Face of God, p. 31.
The Infantilizing Process 137
61. Anne Graham Lotz, I Saw the Lord (Grand Rapids, MI: Zodervan, 2006),
pp. 90–97.
62. Darcey Steinke, ‘‘Divine Intervention.’’ Los Angeles Times Book Review,
February 24, 2008, p. R2.
63. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, p. 104.
64. See Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Row,
1968), pp. 100–101.
65. Ibid., p. 101.
66. Graham, The Holy Spirit, p. 242.
67. N.A., God Speaks: Devotional (Tulsa, OK: Honor Books, 2007), p. 87.
68. Blackaby and King, Experiencing God, p. 17.
69. Anderson, Who I Am In Christ, p. 27.
70. Houston Smith writes, ‘‘It is obedience to the will of the Father that is the
‘food of Jesus,’ and it is obedience which is to be characteristic of his Body, his Bride,
which is the Church.’’ See Houston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the
Great Tradition (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), p. 133.
71. Schuller, Be (Happy) Attitudes, p. 81.
72. Graham, The Holy Spirit, p. 99.
73. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘‘The Antichrist,’’ in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed.
Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 656, 642.
74. See note 69 above.
75. The Gospel Hour, Trinity Broadcasting Network, September 6, 2006, 7:00
p.m., Channel 40, Orange County, California.
76. Stafford, Knowing the Face of God, p. 45.
77. Anderson, Who I Am in Christ, p. 20.
78. Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health
Communications, Inc. 1997), p. 294.
79. Schuller, Be (Happy) Attitudes, p. 83.
80. The 700 Club, Christian Broadcasting Network, May 9, 2006, 9:00 a.m.,
Channel 40, Orange County, California.
81. ———, Christian Broadcasting Network, August 7, 2007, 9:00 a.m.,
Channel 40, Orange County, California.
82. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 5.
83. Christianity has through the ages offered us many versions of heaven, of
course. Yet heaven as one’s eternal home with a loving Parent-God at the center is
certainly chief among them. See Colleen Mc Dannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven:
A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 14–37.
84. N.A., God Speaks: Devotional (Tulsa, OK: Honor Books, 2000), p. 16.
85. Stafford, Knowing the Face of God, p. 81.
86. Ratzinger, ed., Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 46.
87. My initial allusions to the mythological aspect of Christianity occur earlier in
this chapter, during my discussion of the Eucharist.
138 Becoming God’s Children
88. N.A., The Watchtower (New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society,
March 1, 2008), Vol. 129, No. 5, p. 8.
89. N.A., Awake (New York: Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, March 1, 2008),
Vol. 89, No. 3, pp. 8–9.
90. Graham, The Holy Spirit, p. 10.
91. Lotz, I Saw the Lord, pp. 88–90.
92. Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, pp. 94–95.
CHAPTER
PART TWO
3
Tracking the Parent-God:
The Pastoral Metaphor
The organism has a brain large enough to carry a wide range of memories, some
of which possess only a low probability of ever proving useful. Insight learning
may be performed, yielding the capacity to generalize from one pattern to
another and to juxtapose patterns in ways that are adaptively useful. . . . The
process of socialization in this highest grade of organisms is prolonged and
complex. Its details vary greatly among individuals. The key social feature of
the grade, which is represented by man, the chimpanzee, baboons, macaques,
and perhaps some other Old World primates, is a perception of history.
The organism’s knowledge is not limited to particular individuals and places
with attractive or aversive associations. It also remembers relationships and
incidents through time, and it can engineer improvements in its social status
by relatively sophisticated choices of threat, conciliation, and alliances. It seems
to be able to project mentally into the future, and in a few, extreme cases
deliberate deception is practiced.
(p. 77)
What evolves, then, ‘‘is the directedness of learning—the relative ease with
which certain associations are made and acts are learned, and others bypassed
even in the face of a strong reinforcement’’ (p. 79). In this way (and I will
italicize the words that are absolutely vital to our purpose), ‘‘culture, includ-
ing the more resplendent manifestations of ritual and religion, can be inter-
preted as a hierarchical system of environmental tracking devices. . . . To the
extent that the specific details of culture are not genetic, they can be decoupled
from the biological system and arrayed beside it as an auxiliary system’’ (p. 284).
Here, then, is the overall perspective that enables us to integrate the neuro-
psychological and evolutionary approaches to Christianity’s magical enact-
ments, and in so doing, to deepen and enrich the contextual observations
that have carried us to this juncture.
To understand Christianity as both ‘‘social behavior’’ and ‘‘biological
response,’’ we must include the first society in which and through which all
human beings discover themselves as people ‘‘in the beginning’’ (Gen. 1:1),
namely, the society of neonate and caregiver. For several crucial years (1–5)
the infant and small child track the parent, and the parent tracks the infant
and small child in an adaptive, life-sustaining mutuality (or symbiosis) upon
which the survival of both individual and species entirely depends.
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 141
Homeostasis for the newly born human animal is inextricably bound up with
this environmental tracking system that is memorialized into the emerging
mind-brain and recalled implicitly, and to a lesser extent explicitly, for the
duration of that animal’s existence on the planet. At one level of environmen-
tal tracking, homeostasis is maintained by parental reaction that commonly
takes place (I will echo Wilson as closely as I can) in a few seconds (response
to the child’s pain or hunger); other organismic tracking behaviors involving
bodily training and what we think of as ‘‘manners’’ (adaptive integration into
the familial unit and wider communal group) require anywhere from days to
weeks to months to years for completion. The directedness of this internalized
learning is clear. The little one cries out, calls, mouths his primal syntactic
speech (mama, come), or otherwise indicates through bodily movement and
gesture his biological, emotional urge to gratify his needs, and the big one
responds accordingly, thus fulfilling her or his role in the tracking arrange-
ment. To employ the Christian terminology, associated primarily with the
act of supplication as we’ve seen, the little one asks and the big one sees to it
that he receives (Luke 11:9–10).
As the little one develops mnemonically through such directional learning,
he remembers not merely individuals and places with attractive or aversive
associations; he remembers relationships through time, and this yields the
capacity to generalize from one pattern of relationship (mama/daddy) to
another pattern of relationship (the God who watches over him [tracks
him]/mother church)—in short, to juxtapose patterns in modes that are adap-
tively useful. He comes to Christianity with a perception of history, with
the contextual knowledge of his first salvational experience in the hands (quite
literally) of his transformational (‘‘magical’’), loving, omnipotent provider
who comprised for many crucial years his principal environment, his world.
Thus, he comes to Christianity with the concomitant ability to project into
the future, to use his past experience in his efforts to deal with the world in
which he discovers himself. Because these manifold, two-way (child/parent),
biological adaptations are not strictly genetical, they can be decoupled from
the biological system and arrayed beside it as an auxiliary system for tracking
the environment, the magical system of Christianity, for example, which is
designed explicitly to cope with problems that resemble, indeed that inevi-
tably call to mind and to body, the problems with which the little one coped
‘‘in the beginning.’’ Was he small and vulnerable in the beginning? Well, he
still is as he confronts the unpredictable, overwhelming forces of nature and
culture that surround him: accident, illness, injustice, enemies, floods, earth-
quakes, droughts, and starvation. Was he afraid of separation in the beginning?
Was he anxious about finding himself alone? Well, he still is (especially in our
142 Becoming God’s Children
anomic, modern social order) as he copes with the cessation of parental care,
with ‘‘growing up,’’ with the sheer physical and emotional recognition that he
is, in fact, alone, or ‘‘on his own’’ in the world around him. Was he instinctu-
ally, organically afraid of cessation, of death? Of course he was, like all creatures
great and small. Well, he still is, and afraid not only instinctually but con-
sciously, perceptually, and existentially. As a ‘‘grown-up’’ he must confront
cessation not only in his body but in his mind, his imagination; he must
contemplate his end (dust to dust), and in such contemplation (‘‘Alas, poor
Yorick!’’) he must confront the primal terror that all human beings confront
through their symbol-making capacity, through their ‘‘higher consciousness.’’
It hardly needs to be added, of course, that all of this taken together, smallness,
separation, and death, holds the potential to engender considerable anxiety, not
to say genuine emotive malaise, in the normal, everyday human creature as he
goes about his business on the planet. So what does the creature do?
Predictably, adaptively, and to a certain degree shrewdly, he falls back on
what worked. Tracking the parental big one worked early on, so let’s juxtapose
patterns, decouple the strictly biological from the purely inventive, and do
the same thing all over again in our predicament, when we find ourselves cop-
ing with dangers and discomforts during a later stage of our development.
Let’s become ‘‘little children’’ again; let’s follow a Big One again (lead us
not into temptation), depend on a Big One, ask of a Big One, feed on a
Big One (Jesus as umbilical Vine), go into a Big One (the Eucharist), and
thus, precisely thus, we’ll find ourselves ‘‘delivered’’ again. We’ll feel attached,
secure, empowered, and last but certainly not least, immortal (O death,
where is thy sting?). In other words, we’ll escape our primal fears, our primal
anxieties, and by so doing we’ll function better, more adaptively, more home-
ostatically, as we deal with the challenges, the demands, the sorrows, and the
pleasures that greet us along the way. Through the magical system of Chris-
tianity we’ll fashion another, alternative identity (a version of the original
one we experienced), and place it alongside the problematical, biological
one with which our development has saddled us. We’ll become two people,
one in the natural, physical, ‘‘fallen’’ world of smallness, separation, and mor-
tality, and the other in the ‘‘spiritual’’ domain of eternal bonding, eternal
security, eternal innocence, first as the creational Garden is restored to us
(the new Adam) and subsequently as Heaven opens its magnificent, pearly
portals. No matter that our infancy and early childhood were imperfect,
had their flaws, even perhaps their miseries. They were, in the last analysis,
‘‘good enough’’ (Winnicott, p. 12). They worked, and that’s all we need.
We can idealize and refashion as much as we wish, now; we can luxuriate fully
in contemplation of a perfect, flawless, loving Parental-Presence who is there,
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 143
Evolution can select animals in such a way that they have general goals, purposes,
and values. . . . The past experience of natural selection adjusts the set points of
value systems . . . that are adaptive for survival. In our case, the brain of a con-
scious human being, serving as a somatic selective system, uses value constraints
to project the future in terms of categories [parent/child] and goals [security].
(they want to stone Him when He’s finished). Our analytical ears, and eyes,
are wide open, and we are grateful for the information.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the
sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his
own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.
And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the
sheep follow him: for they know his voice.
And a stranger they will not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not
the voice of strangers.
(John 10:1–5)
Working to refine His meaning for those who attend, Jesus continues,
All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not
hear them.
I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in
and out, and find pasture.
The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come
that they may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.
(John 7–11)
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall
any man pluck them out of my hand.
Here, within the pastoral metaphor through which Christ delivers his pivotal
explanation of what becomes doctrinally the Christian religion itself, is the early
period of our biological lives, down to a tee: the helpless little ones are
ensconced in their special place, their nook, their gated room; vulnerable, at
risk, ultimately within reach of the world’s ‘‘evil,’’ its dangers, its corruptions,
its thievery and murder; dependent entirely on the big one who watches over
them, protects them, feeds them (in ‘‘pasture’’), ensures that they have and will
continue to have the ‘‘life’’ they naturally crave. Just as the infant is instinctively
attracted to the parent’s ‘‘voice’’ (and ‘‘face’’ as we shall see very soon), so the lit-
tle ones in the ‘‘sheepfold’’ know the ‘‘voice’’ of their provider and ‘‘follow’’ after
it (track it) when they hear it. Not only do they balk at following after strangers;
they ‘‘flee’’ from them when they hear their unfamiliar voices, just as human
infants and small children anxiously shy away from those to whom they are
not instinctually and/or socially connected. And, of course, the shepherd
‘‘names’’ his sheep and ‘‘calls them out by name,’’ makes them his individual
charges, members of his personal, pastoral family with whom he goes forward
‘‘hand in hand’’ (John 10:29). The ‘‘environmental tracking device’’ on which
Wilson concentrated earlier from his evolutionary perspective is captured per-
fectly, finally, when Jesus declares that He will not only protect and provide
for His charges but will ensure them ‘‘life more abundantly,’’ which is to say,
see to it that they receive from the ‘‘environment’’ everything they require to
flourish. To render the issue from a homeostatic angle, to track after Jesus is
to get all one needs, just as the infant/child gets all he needs by following after
the biological provider (the human animal’s original tracking device).
Let’s bear in mind that the ‘‘sheep’’ of Christ’s ‘‘parable’’ are explicitly His
‘‘little children’’ (Matt. 18:3), made so, or soon to be made so, through
baptismal rite, through spiritual ‘‘rebirth.’’ Indeed, only as Christ’s ‘‘little
children’’ can the followers or trackers find their way to the eternal ‘‘pasture’’
of ‘‘salvation,’’ or the ‘‘kingdom of heaven’’ that is now ‘‘at hand.’’ Too, the
‘‘sheep’’ have established themselves as ‘‘worthy’’ followers of Jesus by
‘‘loving’’ Him ‘‘more’’ than they love their natural, biological parents
(Matt. 10:37), by putting Him in the parent’s place. Jesus, the Shepherd after
Whom the sheep track, has become explicitly a parental presence. At the end
of His ‘‘parable,’’ Christ firmly declares, ‘‘I and my Father are one’’
(John 10:30), which is to say, Jesus is now to be identified equally with the
‘‘Father’’ as the creator of the flock, as the divine progenitor of the followers,
the trackers who look to Him for their existence, their lives, and well-being.
And like all good parents who love their children overwhelmingly, uncondi-
tionally, Jesus affirms His willingness to die for His offspring, for His ‘‘little
ones,’’ for those who follow dependently after Him when He calls them forth
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 147
by name from their shady nook—a wishful, idealized echo of the biological
provider whose devotion to his little guy or gal is total, limitless, and com-
plete. As for the ‘‘biological dictate’’ of mortality, the one dire earthy given
that no one gets around, even that Christ Jesus defeats, or as Edelman would
say, denies. To track Him is to live forever, to know the ‘‘pasture’’ forever, to
experience what might be termed ‘‘eternal adaptation’’ or ‘‘eternal homeosta-
sis.’’ The collapse of organic integrity, the blunt fact of biological decay and
extinction (Yorick’s skull) is ultimately canceled as Christianity restores the
worshiper through the infantilization process to the period of biological life
that obtained before one became conscious of separation from the matrix,
before one gained awareness of his eventual biologic disappearance from the
world. The magical ‘‘shepherd’’ transforms his ‘‘sheep,’’ his grown-up fol-
lowers, into perfectly secure ‘‘little children,’’ offspring as they were ‘‘in the
beginning,’’ in Eden, in the Garden days of flawless, timeless symbiotic
merger with the Big One. Thus we see in the parable of the ‘‘sheepfold’’ the
overall aim of the Christian religion, or how it works in the mind and the body.
Christ’s worshipers, Christ’s devotees, Christ’s trackers are returned through
implicit recollection to the primal stage during which eternal union and eternal
life were emotively or affectively real: death and separation did not yet concep-
tually exist. In this way, the actual biological program (or tracking system) of
the infant and caregiver is decoupled from its biological foundation and
arrayed metaphorically alongside the ‘‘cultural institution’’ or ‘‘religion’’ where
it can awaken mnemonically the original ‘‘pattern’’ and thus restore the primal
adaptation, the primal security, the primal homeostasis upon which each of us
relied as we sought to get under way ‘‘in the beginning.’’ The pastoral meta-
phor, to employ Edelman’s terminology, seeks to fashion through memory ‘‘a
perceptual identity between present and past objects.’’5 As we’ve contended
all along, it is precisely the mnemonic resuscitation of such affect, such feeling,
such emotion that catalyzes the appearance of the wondrous ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ in
the worshiper’s endogenous perceptual field, an appearance that triggers in turn
his heartfelt belief in the veracity of the Christian ‘‘story,’’ its mythologized
version of our origins and destiny that to this very day enchants the countless
millions who seek to reverse, for perfectly understandable reasons, the stern
‘‘dictates’’ of our biological existence.
The centrality and frequency of pastoral metaphors in the Judeo-Christian
tradition is randomly attributed to the ubiquity of pastoral life in the ancient
Near East.6 ‘‘Pastor’’ in the religious sense derives ultimately from ‘‘pastor’’ in
the Biblical sense of ‘‘shepherd.’’ But to let it go at that, to adhere exclusively
to a historical exegesis (as is usually the case), would be arrantly superficial.
The pastoral metaphor is everywhere, and frequently at the center of decisive
148 Becoming God’s Children
doctrinal exposition, because the pastoral situation in and of itself, with con-
troller, caregiver, and guide in charge of helpless, dependent trackers or fol-
lowers, lends unerring metaphorical expression to the inward essence of
Christianity, its psychological/neurological foundations in the early period
of our lives, the period during which the original biological tracking arrange-
ment between caregiver and neonate is implemented for years and internal-
ized deeply into the mind-brain of the potential believer, the worshiper and
follower of the explicitly parental Deity Who watches over his explicit ‘‘little
children.’’ During but one stage of our participation in the natural order of
things did we know perfect or relatively perfect security and perfect or rela-
tively perfect love as we luxuriated in the hands of the ministering big one.
Christianity’s chief aim, from which comes its appeal, is to restore the faithful
to precisely that situation on the supernatural (magical) level and thereby to
remove from their existence on the earth the natural, biological imperfections
that all of us inherit simply by virtue of our having been born. If ‘‘metaphor’’
is ‘‘the currency of the mind,’’ as Edelman maintains in his evolutionary
writings, and if ‘‘memory’’ is ‘‘the key element in consciousness’’ or in what
Edelman calls ‘‘the remembered present,’’7 then the pastoral metaphor as it
is consciously employed in the Judeo-Christian tradition purchases our
admission to the psychological/neurological analysis in which we may behold
the wishful, emotional roots of present-day Christian thought and practice.
Just listen to the commentators as they pin the matter down for us.
‘‘Learning to listen to God’s voice is critical if you and I want to maintain
the fire of our personal revival,’’ writes Anne Graham Lotz.8
Jesus taught that listening to His voice is one of the fundamental principles of
discipleship. He described Himself as the Good Shepherd and you and me as
His sheep when He taught, ‘‘the sheep listen to his [the Shepherd’s] voice. He
calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. . . . His sheep follow Him
because they know his voice.’’
But the eastern shepherd was, and in many parts of the world still is, very
different. He raised his sheep from the time they were lambs and maintained
responsibility for them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in
and year out, for their entire lifetime. There were no dogs or fences or tattoos.
The Eastern Shepherd of Jesus’s day raised his sheep primarily in the Judean
uplands. The countryside was rocky, hilly, and filled with deep crevices and ra-
vines. Patches of grass were sparse. So the shepherd had to establish a personal,
working relationship with each sheep, developing its love and trust in him in
order to lead it to where the path was smoothest, the pasture was the greenest,
the water was the cleanest, and the nights were the safest. The shepherd always
led the sheep. He knew their names, and when he called them, they recognized
his voice, following him like a swarm of little chicks follow the mother hen.
When he stopped, the sheep huddled closely around him, pressing against his
legs. Their personal relationship with him was based on his voice, which they
knew and trusted.
(p. 141)
‘‘In this parable,’’ concludes Lotz, ‘‘you and I are the sheep, the Good
Shepherd is Jesus, and the voice of the Good Shepherd is the Word of God.
Our Shepherd speaks to us through the written words of our Bible, and His
words are personal’’ (p. 141). The psychological/neurological gist of all this
could hardly be plainer.
The ‘‘Eastern shepherd’’ attends to his sheep in a manner that strikingly
recalls the manner in which human parents attend to their own little ‘‘lambs,’’
maintaining their parental responsibility ‘‘twenty-four hours a day,’’ establish-
ing a climate of ‘‘trust’’ and ‘‘love,’’ guiding their offspring toward the
‘‘smoothest paths,’’ the ‘‘greenest pastures,’’ the ‘‘safest’’ locations for rest and
sleep. Lotz even offers us an actual ‘‘tracking device’’ that explicitly reflects
the essence of the tracking arrangement among humans during the early
period when she alludes to a ‘‘swarm’’ of ‘‘chicks’’ following after their mama
hen. But we don’t need Lotz’s chicks and hens to fathom the significance of
the pastoral metaphor in Christian thought and practice. We have our own
human experience, our own early stage of biological existence that provides
us not only with the nature of Christianity’s appeal to the human subcon-
scious but with the mnemonic mechanism through which arises the mysteri-
ous Holy Spirit when the Christian practitioner finds himself convinced by
the overall mythologic configuration to which he is exposed as he involves
himself in the magical enactments of the creed (baptism, prayer, the
150 Becoming God’s Children
Eucharist, and the Scriptural metaphors of vine and shepherd). ‘‘You and
I are the sheep,’’ and ‘‘the Good Shepherd is Jesus,’’ declares our theological
expert (Lotz, p. 141). As for the most decisive and revealing utterance in
the whole of Lotz’s rendition of Christianity through the pastoral metaphor,
it resides in her remark that the shepherd ‘‘maintained his responsibility’’
for his sheep ‘‘twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year in and year
out, for their entire lifetime’’ (my emphasis). Here is the very crossroads of
the human tracking systems both biological and symbolic in a single sentence,
if the reader will allow the pun. I mean, human beings do not receive from
their caregivers, their ‘‘shepherds,’’ all that the docile, ever-dependent sheep
receive. They are not led about (or allowed to follow after) for the entire
length of their lives. In contrast to the ovine little ones, the human ‘‘lambs’’
must separate from the caregiver/shepherd as their earthly existence goes for-
ward; they must relinquish their dependent reliance upon the big one, go
out on their own, confront the future with its dangers and challenges, includ-
ing, of course, the future’s final culmination (and termination) in death.
So what do the humans do when through their higher consciousness (ultimately
a tracking feature) they find themselves staring straight at the ‘‘biological dic-
tates’’ of separation, smallness, and morality? Well, what millions of them do
in our modern Western culture about which I am writing here is precisely
what this book has been suggesting they do from its inception: they discover
through the Christian religion that awaits them with open arms a way to keep
the original tracking arrangement alive by relocating it on the symbolic,
supernatural plane (Christianity’s infantilizing process); they subscribe to a
theological ‘‘story’’ about a spiritual ‘‘Shepherd,’’ a Parent-God, who contin-
ues to love and watch over them (track them) ‘‘for their entire lifetime,’’ long
after the separation stage of their development has transpired. In this way,
they simply remove, or deny, the problematic biological dictates, thereby
diminishing the uncertainty and anxiety that attends them in their vulner-
able, separated state, or alternatively, increasing their adaptation to the
environment in which they reside and function. Christianity, the ‘‘environ-
mental tracking device’’ (Wilson, p. 284), has spied the destabilizing dangers.
Human beings are not separate, says the Christian creed; they are not alone,
and small, and vulnerable; they do not face a future that leads ineluctably to
death, extinction, and removal from the world and from all the loved ones
that world contains. On the contrary, human beings will be shepherded for
all eternity, led by the hand, in the care of a perfect parental presence through
whom they will know only security, love, and everlasting life.
Neil T. Anderson, in a section titled ‘‘God’s Love Reaches into the
Future,’’9 makes the matter crystal clear. ‘‘With God,’’ he writes,
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 151
Anderson concludes with the assertion ‘‘our relationship with God is not a
question of our ability to hang on to Him. It really isn’t within our own per-
sonal power to do that anyway. The fact is, God holds on to us, and He has
the power to keep us securely and safely in His hand’’ (p. 135). Can we fail
to perceive the upshot? Powerless, utterly dependent, led by the hand like
a little child who is apt to get lost, the Christian ‘‘lamb’’ follows after the
Shepherd into a psychological/neurological realm of perfect ‘‘security’’ and
perfect ‘‘safety’’ both of which are his to enjoy forevermore. There is no
separation, no vulnerability, no future in the anxiety-inducing sense of
ordinary time leading to one’s ultimate extinction. As in the early period of
symbiotic merger with the caregiver, the period during which the organ
relationship of parent and newcomer places the child within the emotional
orbit of his natural controller and guide, the infantilized Christian is ulti-
mately removed from the reach of ‘‘biological dictates’’ with the potential to
upset his adaptational equilibrium. ‘‘No organism,’’ wrote Wilson in the
materials with which we opened this section, ‘‘is ever perfectly adapted’’
(p. 74). Christianity, by fashioning another, supernatural ‘‘environment’’ in
which its adherents may track after an omnipotent Parent-God with the
capacity to dispense ‘‘eternal’’ security and safety, strives to give Wilson’s
realistic, earthly observation the lie.
God is far more interested in a love relationship with you than He is in what
you can do for Him. His desire is for you to love Him. . . . You can trust Him
to guide you and provide for you. . . . Agree with God that you will follow
Him [track Him] one day at a time. Agree to follow Him even when He does
not spell out all the details. Agree that you will let Him be your Way.10
152 Becoming God’s Children
Pray to God thusly, instruct Blackaby and King at this juncture: ‘‘Lord, I will
do anything that your kingdom requires of me. Wherever You want me to
be, I’ll go. Whatever the circumstances, I’m willing to follow. If You want
to meet a need through my life, I am your servant; and I will do whatever
is required’’ (p. 37). Rather than abandon such material to whatever it hap-
pens to signify for whoever happens to read it or utter it or think it—it
can mean, simply, anything—we must recognize its specific power and
appeal within the framework of Christianity’s infantilizing process. Blackaby
and King are looking to recapture a ‘‘love relationship’’ they once knew and
deeply internalized as they ‘‘trusted’’ and ‘‘followed’’ after the big one during
the period of their lives when the caregiver’s ‘‘way’’ was the only trustworthy,
loving, gratifying way and when the follower’s will was entirely bound up
with the will of the omnipotent parental presence, the proverbial lord of
the nursery. In other words, it makes no difference to the Christian what the
particulars of his or her following are—to work for the Salvation Army, to
forgive the family members he or she rejected as a youth, to go off as a mis-
sionary in the outback of Australia, to stay at home and raise the kids, or a
thousand other things. What ultimately matters is that one returns psycho-
logically or inwardly to the ‘‘love relationship,’’ the putative will-lessness,
the ‘‘trust,’’ the sense of tracking and union that one knew ‘‘in the begin-
ning.’’ The worshiper feels loved, secured, guided, and bonded when he gets
back to this arrangement with a big one, and he gets back to it precisely
(how else?) by mentally becoming a will-less, trusting, loving, and tracking
‘‘infant’’ once again. The Christian religion always works for those who
become ‘‘little children’’ because whatever it is that one is doing, he gains
a sense of connection through his implicit mnemonic rediscovery of the
little one’s ‘‘way’’ (Blackaby and King, p. 37), the little one’s inner world.
The magical identity with its promise of loving union and eternal security
lessens or even removes the anxiety, or perhaps the existential discomfort,
that attends the biological identity of separate, vulnerable, time-bound mortal
man or woman.
Here are a few more citations from Blackaby and King that tell us why
‘‘a love relationship with God’’ is so important: ‘‘He loves you. He knows
what is best for you [if the reader had a childhood he’ll remember that
one]. Only He can guide you to invest your life in worthwhile ways.
The guidance will come as you walk with Him and listen to Him [track
and recognize His ‘‘voice’’ as in John 10:4]’’ (p. 91). Or again,
about to do and to His ways of doing it. If we will not submit God will let us
follow our own device [that is, allow us not to track Him].
(p. 106)
God, when You invite me to join You in Your work, I will respond immediately.
I will adjust my life to You. Show me how to respond to what You lovingly
reveal to me. It is an awesome privilege to be in a love relationship with You
and have You trust me to join in Your work. I am ready to join You. Show me
Your timing. Make clear to me what You are doing. I praise You that You have
promised to complete whatever You start. I surrender to Your invitation. Lead
me to where I should begin.
(pp. 129–30)
Clearly, the tracking metaphor, the ‘‘following,’’ the ‘‘guidance,’’ the ‘‘walking
with God,’’ the ‘‘obedience’’ and ‘‘surrender’’—all of this—is paramount in a
context that is left wide open. What does it mean to ‘‘walk with’’ or ‘‘listen to’’
God, to ‘‘adjust’’ one’s life to what God wants one to do, to ‘‘submit’’ to His
‘‘will,’’ to be ‘‘led’’ to ‘‘where one should begin,’’ and all the rest of it? Over and
over again we hear this sort of thing on television, or in church; over and over
again we read such declarations in the Christian literature, as here. The answer
is, it means whatever the Christian wants it to mean, whatever he happens to
consider godly in his moment of inspiration, for whatever reasons he manufac-
tures through his consciousness and his subconsciousness, the latter of which is
not available to him when his putative will-lessness gives way to his desired goal.
The specifics do not matter. What matters, as I’ve suggested, is the magical sense
that one is back in the dependent, symbiotic relationship of trust, and love, and
uninterrupted tracking in which one luxuriated early on. When the Christian
arouses through his implicit recollection the feeling of being in as opposed to
out, the ‘‘way’’ of the Lord, whatever it happens to be, has made itself known.
Does the Holy Spirit, perchance, have a hand in all this? Of course it does,
for the Holy Spirit is itself but a magical metaphor of the addictive recollec-
tion one craves as he strives to track the Big One’s commanding presence or
‘‘voice’’ in his life. ‘‘Is it important to know when the Holy Spirit is speaking
to you,’’ ask Blackaby and King? They immediately reply, ‘‘Yes!’’ Then come
the words, ‘‘How do you know what the Holy Spirit is saying’’ (p. 176)? An
excellent question! Here is the answer, to which we must pay very close atten-
tion: ‘‘I cannot give you a formula,’’ writes Blackaby, now speaking for both
himself and his co-author;
154 Becoming God’s Children
I can tell you that you will know His voice when He speaks (John 10:4). You must
decide that you only want His will. You must dismiss any selfish or fleshy desire of
your own. Then as you start to pray, the Spirit of God starts to touch your heart
and cause you to pray in the direction of God’s will. ‘‘It is God who works in
you both to will and to do for His good pleasure’’ (Phil. 2:13). . . . When you pray,
anticipate that the Holy Spirit already knows what God has ready for your life.
(p. 176)
Through precisely this methodology for contacting the Holy Spirit does
the underlying, appetitive psychology of ‘‘doing God’s work,’’ or ‘‘following
God’s way,’’ emerge within the framework of Christianity’s infantilizing process.
The worshiper is instructed to act out, to imitate (homeopathic magic) the
assertion of John 10:4 that ‘‘the sheep follow him: for they know his voice’’
through the ritual of prayer, a ritual, as we previously established, in which
the supplicant adopts specifically the role of the helpless, dependent little one
crying out to the loving, omnipotent Big One for succor and support. If this
behavior awakens the implicit recollection of parental ministration and care,
then the putative ‘‘Holy Spirit,’’ right on schedule, will prompt one’s ‘‘heart’’
to pray ‘‘in the direction of God’s will,’’ and we are back to Blackaby and King’s
opening assertion, the significance of which is now in full view, that ‘‘God is far
more interested in a love relationship with you than He is in what you can do
for Him. His desire is for you to love Him’’ (p. 36). Accordingly, the tracker,
the follower, the worshipful lamb whose will now belongs entirely to the
Shepherd and whose ‘‘fleshly’’ or adult ‘‘desires’’ have now been entirely
‘‘dismissed’’ reaches his ultimate, magical goal, namely, symbiotic union with
the Lord. No longer ‘‘lost’’ in the biological world, which means existing
without a ‘‘love relationship’’ with the Big One, but doing the Almighty’s
‘‘work’’ on the spiritual plane, which means doing whatever one’s mind has
happened to create as a worthy goal, the believer has come full circle, from
the early period of security and innocence to anxiety-inducing separation
(including the awareness of death) and back again to the realm of eternal
provision and care. The ‘‘formula’’ here, needless to say, is the formula for the
Christian religion as a whole; Blackaby and King’s extended discussion of
how one goes about learning to ‘‘follow’’ God’s ‘‘way,’’ or to do ‘‘God’s work,’’
is merely one more facet of the infantilizing procedure. What are those
concluding lines of Charles Wesley’s wishful prayer cited earlier?
We no longer have to wonder, then, what the word ‘‘lost’’ signifies when
theologian H. Richard Niebuhr tells us in a prototypical Christian moment
that Jesus ‘‘seeks and saves the lost.’’12 We have the pastoral metaphor, the
‘‘lost sheep of Israel,’’ to inform our understanding as we derive psychologi-
cal/neurological specificity as opposed to flaccid generality from the utter-
ance. Although its precise emotional, circumstantial denotation will differ
in each and every case (no two snowflakes are exactly alike, etc.), ‘‘lost’’ signi-
fies in the Christian context separate, alone, isolated, abandoned, on one’s
own, or, to turn the coin over, not merged, not bonded, not joined to a big
one, not contained symbiotically in the body of salvational Jesus—in short,
not receiving the adaptational sensation one receives as he enjoys the
deep-seated, implicit recollection of the loving, ministering parental presence
(the ‘‘Holy Spirit’’). It is when the Christian’s participation in the creed’s
infantilizing magic allows him to follow his memorial capacities all the way
back to the ‘‘beginning,’’ to his original security-inducing interactions with
the nurturing biological caregiver, that he finds his ‘‘way,’’ which means his
escape from the dreaded biological dictates of his natural, mortal existence
on a ‘‘fallen’’ planet.
The reader may be thinking, wait a minute! Surely within a Christian
context ‘‘lost’’ may have a moral denotation, may indicate the seeker’s failure
to lead a moral life, one based on Christian principles, one grounded in
the decent, chaste, substance-free treatment of oneself and others. Is not
Christianity ultimately a moral system, a moral guide to human conduct?
The answer, of course, is that Christian morality does not stand apart from
Christianity’s infantilizing process. The two go together, in powerful com-
bination. To be a good, obedient Christian, to respect Christianity’s moral
teachings, is also to be in a bonded relationship with the Savior as His ‘‘little
child,’’ His ‘‘sheep,’’ His helpless, dependent follower, as one He will never
‘‘forsake’’ or ‘‘abandon’’: follow Christ ‘‘as dear children,’’ not as ‘‘children of
disobedience,’’ instructs the New Testament (Eph. 5:1, 6). Accordingly, to
be ‘‘bad,’’ disobedient, unlawful, unchaste, unwholesome, alcohol or drug
addicted, or even selfish and insincere is for the Christian to feel ‘‘lost,’’ alone,
‘‘out in the cold,’’ without the sense of parental connection to a big one, to a
loving source of security and succor—a grievous, painful, extreme version of
the very feelings of biological separation that goad the bond to Jesus into life
in the first place. When the drunk, or the drug addict, or the prostitute on the
street, or the bank robber on parole finds Jesus and begins to participate in
Christianity’s infantilizing rites and narratives, to do the magic in short, he
or she also discovers the long-forgotten inward sensation of being valued,
and cherished, and held. That is what impels him or her to stay the course.
156 Becoming God’s Children
‘‘Go out there again’’ (note the word ‘‘out’’ as opposed to ‘‘in’’), the reformed
Christian asks himself ? ‘‘Lose this feeling of self-love and self-worth based
upon my Christian faith? Not a chance’’! As human beings, we don’t need
the supernatural to achieve morality. The moral impulse can take vigorous
root within the natural, secular realm. What resides at the foundation of
Christianity’s moral directives is the emotional, psychological tie to the super-
natural Big One Who, on the plane of magic, holds His ‘‘dear child’’ forever
in His heart of hearts.
With our increasingly rich, perhaps newly found awareness of what resides
at the psychological/neurological ground of the pastoral metaphor, its devel-
opmental, emotional relationship to the engendering experiences upon
which our lives as biological organisms move forward ‘‘in the beginning,’’ let’s
sample a few excerpts from famous Christian prayers both past and present.
Let’s get a feeling for what Christians are actually saying and seeking beneath
the surface imagery of certain heartfelt expressions of their faith.
Here is Saint Augustine:
I thank thee, O my Light, that Thou didst shine upon me; that Thou didst teach
my soul what Thou wouldst be to me, and didst incline Thy face in pity unto me;
Thou, Lord, hast become my Hope, my comfort, my Strength, my All. In Thee
doth my soul rejoice. . . . When I loved darkness, I knew Thee not, but wandered
on from night to night. But Thou didst lead me out of that blindness. Thou didst
take me by the hand and call me to thee, and now I can thank Thee, and Thy
mighty voice which hath penetrated to my inmost heart.13
recollection of the time in which he actually knew the guidance and the loving
security he craves.
‘‘Thank you, Father, for your love,’’ writes Corrie ten Boom, and then,
Thank you for hearing our prayers and giving us that which You know is best for
us. We thank You that we need never walk in darkness, because you are leading
us and showing us the way, step by step. Teach us, Lord, to be obedient. . . . Show
us in what way we still hold on to our own will and desires, and give us the courage
to leave all in Your hands, Thank you, Father, that You will always speak to us when
we come to You with a heart which is willing to hear and willing to do as You say.
(p. 23)
Once again, whatever the dilemma the supplicator confronts, its solution
resides in tracking the Big One Who ‘‘knows what is best’’ for His sheep,
Who leads them and shows them the way, step by baby step, as in the opening
stages of their biological lives. The prayer beseeches the Deity to instruct
her not merely in ‘‘obedience’’ but in ‘‘leaving’’ her ‘‘desires’’ and her ‘‘will’’
entirely His hands, an accomplishment that can occur only within the
realm of implicit recollection, the memorial trace (or phenomenology) of
the early period when the ‘‘will’’ and the ‘‘desires’’ of the newcomer are
inextrically intertwined with the direction of the omnipotent biological pro-
vider. Simply to brush one’s teeth and comb one’s hair negates in reality the
notion of ‘‘leaving’’ everything in ‘‘God’s hands’’ unless one behaves with an
inward sense of the Big One’s overarching participation in one’s activities,
a sense that drifts toward consciousness from the implicit memorial realm
as it is aroused by Christianity’s infantilizing beliefs and practices.
‘‘Lord what can I say?’’ asks Oswald Chambers at the commencement of
his heartfelt supplication. He goes on,
Keep me simply Thine. To body, soul and spirit come with the influx of life.
Lord, through all the multitudinous duties keep me calm, ennoble by Thy touch
and tenderness. O Lord, it is Thee I want, strong and mighty and pure. Settle me
and quieten me down in Thee. Thy word says, ‘‘Casting all your cares upon Him,
for He careth for you.’’ What a wonder those words are! Lord, I look to thee that
I may be renewed in the spirit of my mind. How entirely I look to Thee! Unto
Thee do I come in great and glad expectancy. Cleanse me from flurry, and keep
me purely and calmly Thine. Gather me into concentrated peace in Thee.
(p. 57)
to the time during which the ‘‘tender touch’’ of the caregiver ‘‘settled’’ and
‘‘quieted down’’ the agitated, exhausted newcomer. Note above all the way
in which the little one’s relief transpires ‘‘in’’ the Big One: ‘‘quieten me down
in Thee’’ (my emphasis). The symbiotic interaction of the early period is as
much emotional as it is physical, as much a matter of feeding the newcomer
with loving care as with bodily nourishment. We never learn from Chambers
(as we never learn from Augustine) the specific nature of his trials, his dis-
comforts, his ‘‘multitudinous duties’’ because the only thing that matters to
him, as to Christians generally, is the invariant solution as follows: ‘‘Gather
me into concentrated peace in Thee.’’ To be in the body/spirit of the Big
One, calm, secure, a perfectly adapted babe in arms, as it were, is the Chris-
tian’s ultimate goal. Were we to ‘‘translate’’ Chamber’s supplication into the
underlying infantile feelings that serve finally as its emotional inspiration we
would have the Big One saying to the little one in a soothing voice, ‘‘There,
there; hush now; shh; everything is going to fine; there, there.’’ Christians
who follow after the Shepherd are seeking, one and all, such tender, parental
reassurance as they go about their stressful, biosocial lives.
Observe the lack of homeostasis, of soothing adaptation to the stressful
environment, that confronts the Christian who fails to track after the Deity.
‘‘Oh blessed Lord!’’ begins Longfellow,
Here is a ‘‘sheep’’ not only ‘‘wandering’’ from the ‘‘fold’’ but feeling miserable
about it. We don’t know the nature of the ‘‘night’’ into which Longfellow
‘‘sinks’’ anymore than we know the nature of Augustine’s ‘‘darkness’’ or
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 159
When Thou sayst that I must, my heart says, ‘‘I can.’’ My strength is propor-
tional to the strength of those cords that bind me. I am never so unrestrained
as when I am constrained by Thy love. Evermore, Thou Divine Spirit, guide
me by this instinct of the right. Put round about my heart the cord of Thy cap-
tivating love, and draw me wither in my own light I would not go. Bind me to
Thyself as thou bindest the planets to the sun, that it may become the very law
of my nature to be led by Thee. May I be content to know that goodness and
mercy shall follow me without waiting to see them in advance of me.
(p. 101)
It is not inconceivable that over the course of human evolution a memory struc-
ture developed for spatial orientation—one that was later employed for other
cognitive functions. The uses to which lower animals apply spatial cognition
implies as much. Or to put it more provocatively: in the animal kingdom,
spatial cognition is the most widespread form of thought.
(p. 77)
As He fills you with His presence, He will guide you to do things. But even as
you do those things, He will be the One at work through you to accomplish
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 161
His purposes. He is all you need. The Christ in you is your way. He is your
‘‘map.’’ When you follow His leadership one day at a time, you will always be
right in the middle of God’s will for your life.16
To exist within the body, within the will of the supernatural Big One magi-
cally resolves the natural dilemmas of existing within one’s own separate, vul-
nerable, mortal body, one’s own fallible, earthly will, not to mention the wills
of other imperfect human beings. ‘‘Sometimes,’’ declares the handbook Our
Daily Bread,
life demands that we weather a storm. At other times it puts us to the test
of tedium. We may feel stuck. What we want most is just out of reach.
But whether we find ourselves in a crisis of circumstance or in a place where
the spiritual wind has been taken out of our sails, we need to trust God for guid-
ance. The Lord, who is sovereign over changing circumstances, will eventually
guide us to our desired heaven.17
As in the supplications we’ve just finished examining, the exact nature of the
‘‘storm’’ or the ‘‘tedium’’ or the ‘‘crisis’’ is left wide open and does not ulti-
mately matter. Of sole significance is the original map of one’s existence as
it remains available through the jogging of implicit memory, namely, feeling
oneself in the sphere of the Big One’s will, guided, protected, secure among
the flock, and on the way to the Shepherd’s ‘‘haven.’’ When we are ‘‘led by
the Spirit,’’ asserts Our Daily Bread in another place,18 ‘‘our lives will be char-
acterized by joy, peace, and self-control,’’ which is to say, we will have found
our way magically to an emotional/spiritual ‘‘orientation’’ in which the all-
powerful, loving companion constitutes the very ground of our experience.
I’ll leave it to the Christians themselves to bring all this together in a cou-
ple of vivid, unforgettable passages. Note, in particular, the way actual and
magical maps coalesce as they come into play. Remember, too, that we’re still
on the track of the pastoral metaphor’s ultimate significance. When James
Hewett found God, we learn from God Speaks: Devotional,
It seemed as though life was rather like a bike ride, but it was a tandem bike.
God was in the back helping me pedal. I don’t know just when it was that He
suggested we change places, but life has not been the same since. When He took
the lead, it was all I could do to hang on! He took me down delightful paths, up
mountains, and through rocky places— at breakneck speeds.
I was worried and anxious, and asked, ‘‘Where are you taking me’’? He
laughed and didn’t answer, and I started to learn trust. I forgot my boring life
and entered into adventure. When I’d say, ‘‘I’m scared,’’ He’d lean back and
162 Becoming God’s Children
After all, none of us knows what’s around the next bend. Life is a series of hills and
valleys, sharp turns and bumpy roads. Sometimes we’ll be sailing down an inter-
state highway, enjoying the scenery, when we hit an unexpected detour that takes
us miles away from our destination. What if we make a wrong turn and get lost?
Don’t worry. God’s already been there before you. He knows where all the
ruts and potholes and speed traps are. If you open His map book—the Bible
—He’ll show you the best route to take to avoid the worst roads. You can trust
God to lead you every step of the way. He knows the beginning and the end, as
well as the middle of the journey. He will walk right by your side through every
circumstance of life. And He will never leave you. There is nothing to fear when
you are walking with Him. There is one catch. You actually have to listen and
let Him teach you. You’ll wander around lost if you refuse to read the map
or ask for directions [that is, pray]. So trust Him to lead you in The right
direction. All you have to do is ask! . . .
God knows all your secrets, your hidden fears, your desperate needs, and
even your innermost thoughts. He loves you anyway. Ask for his help to get
your life back on track.
(pp. 39–41)
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 163
Bless O God, those who long to know Thee better and the truth more truly.
And now may the grace of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the love of
God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit abide with us throughout the
remainder of our short and uncertain earthly pilgrimage and forever more.20
they go. Of overriding significance is the manner in which separation from the
Big One, from the Parent-God, from the matrix, is apprehended and explicitly
characterized as forsaking, renouncing, abandoning, as taking away parental
nearness, the ‘‘sweetness’’ of primal union and security. Here precisely is the
presentational utterance that discloses for us the neurological/psychological tie
to the early period, to the original separation and loss the reversal of which, or
the denial of which, is the Christian religion’s ultimate aim.
The metaphor of the pilgrimage, like the acting out of the pilgrimage,
mnemonically resuscitates at the feeling level both sides of the original symbi-
otic union, its compelling ‘‘sweetness’’ as big one and little one interfuse
through an organic relationship designed to further the survival of the spe-
cies, and as big one and little one experience not merely the imperfections
of the early time, but the inevitable, selectional separation in which the origi-
nal symbiosis culminates of necessity. The ‘‘pilgrim’’ wants the Big One to be
‘‘near,’’ and the pilgrim also feels deep within his core the anxiety of his
earthly, biological presence on the planet. He longs for the ‘‘fellowship’’ of
the Holy Spirit, which means the sense of the Big One’s ‘‘nearness’’ during
the course of an ‘‘earthly pilgrimage’’ that is ultimately both ‘‘short’’ (mortal-
ity looming) and ‘‘uncertain’’ (anxiety at work in the worshiper at both the
conscious and unconscious levels). Once again, the pilgrim longs to be in,
not out, joined to the Big One, watched over or shepherded by the Big One
as he goes about his business in the world, ‘‘at home, at work, wherever’’ he
happens to be. The ‘‘motivation to be a pilgrim is complex,’’ the experts tell
us, but ‘‘one of the pilgrimage’s features must be that the devotee sees in it
something of the successful achievement of the whole of life including the
successful arrival at one’s final goal.’’21 Surely we don’t have to puzzle very
long over what that ‘‘final goal’’ might be. Lloyd-Jones’s supplication has
made that perfectly clear, along with the context of this book: to feel the ‘‘inti-
mations’’ (implicit recollections designated as the Holy Spirit) of the Big
One’s ‘‘nearness,’’ to go about tied inwardly to the Parent-God, to the loving
protector and guide Who will never ‘‘forsake,’’ never renounce, never aban-
don the members of His flock. The ‘‘goal’’ is union as union cancels out the
biological reality of separateness. According to Janet Collins in her recent
article on the vogue of pilgrimages in society today, the heart of the ‘‘spiritual
journey’’ is ‘‘the journey itself. . . . All spiritual roads lead to the same destina-
tion.’’22 To track, to follow, or to attain the sense of being shepherded, being
watched over by the Big One is what constitutes the ‘‘journey itself,’’ the acting
out of a basic, instinctual proclivity that, like the asking and receiving of
prayer, recreates the adaptational, survival behaviors of the early, precarious
stage of our natural existence.
166 Becoming God’s Children
Can a discussion of the pastoral metaphor culminate in any other way than
in a presentation of Psalm 23, one of the most influential Biblical utterances
for Jews and Christians alike? I don’t think so.
The worshiper, or the suppliant, views the Lord as his Shepherd, as his careful
guide and protector. Immediately thereafter he strikes a blended maternal
and paternal note: he shall not want; the Herdsman-Master will accord
him everything he requires in the way of emotional and physical nourish-
ment. Dependent, submissive, following along, he will be made to lie down
in green pastures, a striking maternal image of lushness, of leisurely feeding,
chewing, swallowing, digesting, and sleeping; he will be led to the still water,
another vivid maternal image recalling both breast and womb, the peace of
symbiosis, the mirror-like, fluid surface in which the self is birthed into
awareness, existence, being. Such care, such provision, such recollection
of delicious maternal engendering and love adaptationally restores the
suppliant, pleases him soothingly in the innermost regions of his self-
consciousness, his subjectivity, especially as those regions are ruffled by the
tribulations of the journey. The suppliant returns to the paternal sphere.
The Shepherd is morally fastidious; He keeps His flock on stable, solid paths
of righteousness; He is covetous of His unimpeachable identity, His name,
His reputation as entirely dependable and prudent in His decisions for
the route of His flock. All of this, of course, is projectively reassuring to the
one who prays, who worships through the psalm. Such reassurance continues
unabated.
Although the worshiper, or the suppliant, must traverse the dark, harrow-
ing valley of the shadow, although as a member of a mortal flock he must
confront the final, terrifying separation of death, the reengulfment into the
valley-womb whence he arose, he will be fearless because he will not be alone;
the Shepherd will be there with His supportive staff, with His protective rod;
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 167
The ‘‘house of the Lord’’ for the Christian, then, is the ‘‘heart’’ of the ‘‘cruci-
fied God.’’ To that destination precisely does the Shepherd guide the mem-
bers of His flock. Where Judaism stops with the temple and the home,
168 Becoming God’s Children
The mother’s face, then, is the infant’s first map of the world. He awakens not
to ‘‘creation’’ in some all-inclusive sense, but to the face of the caregiver, his
anchor for survival.
‘‘ ‘I’ll draw His face’—that is a refrain I’ve heard spoken in many languages
by children of Christian denominations.’’ Thus observes Robert Coles in his
seminal volume The Spiritual Life of Children.31 Coles proceeds to point out
that 90 percent of the 300 children he asked to draw a picture of God ‘‘drew
pictures of His face’’ (p. 40). When Coles inquired of one sixth-grader,
170 Becoming God’s Children
‘‘ ‘Would you want to go beyond the face?’ . . . There was a pause, and no
response.’’ A moment later, writes the author, ‘‘I spelled out the question:
‘Would you want to draw the body?’ ‘No.’ Another pause and then: ‘I don’t
think of God except for His face; I mean, when I picture Him, it’s His face’ ’’
(pp. 40–41). Even children ‘‘who have pictured Jesus as a man and have seen
Him pictured—walking, talking, eating with His friends and followers,’’
Coles tells us, ‘‘are often reluctant to go beyond the representation of God’s
face’’ (p. 41). The faces of God created by Cole’s subjects mirror those
subjects’ genetical background: white children drew Caucasian faces; black
children drew negroid faces (p. 44). One child declares,
When I look up to God, I think of Him looking down on me. . . . It’s His eyes
that are real special, I’m sure. I mean, He’s as special as you can be, but it’s the
eyes that He uses, to see all of us down here! . . . That’s all I see, His eyes mainly
and His forehead, I guess. . . . He’s looking down and I pray He’ll smile on us.
(p. 52)
Interestingly, one participant who pictures God’s face in his mind wonders
about the face of the ‘‘ ‘Holy Ghost’ ’’: ‘‘ ‘I never figured It had a face’ ’’
(p. 63). For Coles, all of this material taken together reflects the principal rea-
son people (Christians) turn to God or come to ‘‘believe in God’’ in the first
place (p. 6). Following D. W. Winnicott and Ana-Maria Rizzuto, Coles sug-
gests that people long for a God who can watch over them, assist them, succor
them, listen to them when they pray or cry out—in a word, love them. Coles
writes (and we must keep God’s face in mind here), ‘‘a baby uses its eyes’’ in
relation to its ‘‘longings,’’ and ‘‘we adults, babes in the woods of a universe
whose enormity and mystery and frustrations are only too obvious, do like-
wise.’’ Shall we look again at George A. Buttrick’s revelational comment cited
in Chapter 3, Part One in our analysis of prayer? ‘‘God will be found,’’
declares Buttrick, ‘‘by a response in prayer’’ to ‘‘One of whom we are dimly
aware—as a child, half waking, responds to the mother who bends over
him.’’32 This is what it means at the deepest memorial, psychological, emo-
tional level when Coles’s young subjects declare the hope that God’s face,
when they behold it in their minds, will be smiling down upon them.
The upshot is apparent: to comprehend Guardini’s observation that ‘‘God
has no face as we understand it,’’ we must understand the ubiquitous longing
among Christians to ‘‘see the face of God’’ in the full context of Christianity’s
infantilizing agenda, of baptism in which Christ’s followers or trackers become
His ‘‘little children’’; of the Eucharist in which the faithful are fed by and feed
on their Vine, their ultimate source of nourishment, of life itself; of prayer in
which the supplicator approaches his Lord as an utterly helpless little one
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 171
experience with the mother. For several decades this unique, remarkable
aspect of our origins has been studied intensively by observers within the
psychological/neurological community and has come to be regarded gener-
ally as a central structural occurrence of our normal development.
And inborn tendency on the part of the infant prompts him to seek out his
mother’s gaze and to do so regularly and for extended periods. The mother
sets about exploiting this mutual fact-gazing activity. As eye-to-eye contact
becomes frequent, and easily observed by the investigator, the mother’s con-
tinual inclination to change her facial expression, as well as the quality of
her vocalizing, emerges with striking clarity. Usually she smiles, and nods,
and coos; sometimes in response to an infant frown, she frowns. In virtually
every instance, the mother’s facial and vocal behavior comprises an imitation
of the baby’s. Accordingly, as the mother descends to the infant’s level, she
provides him or her with a particular kind of human mirror. She does not
simply give the baby back his or her own self; she reinforces a portion of
the baby’s behavior in comparison with another portion. She gives the baby
back not merely a part of what he or she is doing, but, in addition, something
of her own. As Winnicott expresses the matter, ‘‘In individual . . . develop-
ment the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.’’33 Of particular interest
in this connection is Winnicott’s answer to his own question, ‘‘What does
the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face’’ (p. 112)? He writes,
‘‘I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself.’’
In other words, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is
related to what she sees there (p. 112). Thus, the process that engenders one’s
selfhood appears to go, once again in Winnicott’s aphoristic style, ‘‘when I
look I am seen, so I exist’’ (p. 114). Have we a variation upon the cogito here?
‘‘I was seen, therefore I am’’? Is it possible that René Descartes missed, in his
notorious monistic formulation, the empathetic, relational origin of his and
everyone else’s existence? The point is, when one discovers God’s face in the
Christian realm, one discovers it as an extension of the caregiver one has seen
and loved during the course of one’s early experience, just as we have it in
Coles. This is the personal, individual, subjective core of Christianity, and
as the core it can never be sundered from the theology, no matter how sophis-
ticated the theology may get. The Christian religion cannot be broken up, let
alone gutted of its emotional foundation. The face of God is there for those
who believe because the face of God is the implicit recollection of the loving
parental provider, otherwise known as the ‘‘Holy Spirit.’’
We’re reaching a perspective, now, from which we can appreciate the full
psychological quality, the full psychological tenor of the Christian’s all-
consuming wish to behold the face of his God, the face of his Deity Who
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 173
full personal intimacy comes when we are able not merely to talk, but to see face
to face. . . . John, who twice says that no one has ever seen God, also says this:
‘‘Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet
been made known. But we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him,
for we shall see Him as He is’’ (I John 3:2). And, says John, ‘‘His servants
will . . . see His face’’ (Revelation 22:4). Paul ultimately foresees prophecies,
tongues, and knowledge passing away. But the image of a face does not pass
away. ‘‘Then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know
fully, even as I am fully known’’ (I Corinthians 13:9–12). When the Bible
speaks of the new age when we will be fully satisfied, when we will be intimate
with God in a way that no one on earth has ever experienced, it speaks this
way—in terms of seeing God’s face.35
Stafford continues,
What this means I confess I do not know; I am not convinced that anyone
knows. Our metaphysical speculations are likely to carry little weight at the
time when God clears up our confusion. . . . We must be transformed to see,
and we will only be so transformed in the very act of seeing. Yet we have been
told about it in advance. That is the crucial point, focusing our longing for
God in the right direction. We hunger to know God personally, not merely to
talk about Him but to experience Him as a living character. He is our father:
we long to feel His arms. He has broken down all barriers to love us; we hunger to
be in His possession. This hope drives us on, and it also frustrates us because
we get only glimmers, nothing solid. . . . I believe this longing can only be fulfilled
when our eyes are opened on the loving and glorious face of God. Such will someday
be our joy.
(p. 183, my emphasis)
If Moses could not see what he wanted, if Paul and John admitted their global
ignorance of the wonderful light to come, then we should not be too surprised
at our own sense of incompleteness. Our longing, even our frustration, is nothing
to be ashamed of. . . . We long to know Him completely because we have come
to know Him in part. Now that we have come to know Him, nothing will satisfy
but the sight of His face. . . . We are not condemned to endless searching. God will
find us. He will not always be beyond our sight. He will look into our eyes, and
174 Becoming God’s Children
all the frustrating limits will be purified out of us just by the searching of those eyes.
It will be more than we dreamed of, more than we longed for.
(p. 184, my emphasis)
Everyone is special in God’s eyes. It’s His eyes that are real special, I’m sure. I
mean He’s as special as you can be, but it’s the eyes that He uses to see all of us
down here! . . . I’ll pray to God and I’ll think of Him, and then I’ll see Him,
His face, His eyes. That’s all I see, His eyes, mainly, and His forehead, I guess,
and His hair, not much else. He’s looking down, and I pray He’ll smile on us.
(Coles, p. 52)
Now Stafford:
We are not condemned to endless searching; God will find us. He will not
always be beyond our sight. He will look into our eyes, and all the frustrating
limits will be purified out of us just by the searching of those eyes. It will be
more than we dreamed of, more than we longed for.
(Stafford, p. 184)
Both Coles’s youthful subject and author Stafford are now separated from the
matrix, from the original and originative big one who lovingly nurtured them
into human life and selfhood as we ordinarily employ those terms. Coles’s
subject is now separate as a child in actuality, while Stafford, a grown-up, is
separated as a ‘‘little child’’ (Matt. 18:3) through Christianity’s infantilizing
process. Both are in search of mnemonic cues that will awaken within them
the loving ministrations of the caregiver, the loving symbiotic attachments
and interfusions of the early period that, in their implicit, feeling recollection,
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 175
are officially designated by the creed as the ‘‘Holy Spirit.’’ For both the boy
and the man, the notion of God’s ‘‘face’’ is paramount among just such mne-
monic cues. We no longer have to scratch our heads over this putative ‘‘spir-
itual mystery.’’ The psychological/neurological provenance of what is
occurring here is unmistakable. Where would the eyes of this otherworldly
and explicitly parental face have come from in this Christian context of long-
ing for the Big One, for union as opposed to separation (‘‘God will find us’’),
for the Parent-Deity whose presence makes one feel, at last, complete if not
from our own biological lives as those lives took shape in and through the
mutual face-gazing activity of our opening years? Alluding to the gift of
God’s love, God Speaks: Devotional advises its readers to ‘‘open the door of
your heart today. Look up into God’s loving face and smile at this blessing.
Then close your eyes and imagine Him smiling back at you. God loves
you!’’36 Here is the mnemonic, relational essence of the Christian faith.
Precisely this significance, this inner meaning, is available to us here as we
note Thomas Merton’s insistence that the cardinal aim of the Christian
‘‘mind’’ is ‘‘to see the face of its Creator.’’37 It is available to us as we read Basil
Hume’s supplication (based on Psalm 27), ‘‘It is your face, Lord, that I seek.
Hide not your face,’’38 as we imagine the church choir singing of its wish to
‘‘see the sweet compassion’’ of ‘‘God’s face,’’39 as we peruse Saint Augustine’s
declaration, ‘‘Thy face, Lord, will I seek. . . . The darkness of affection is the
real distance from Thy face,’’40 or as we listen to the all-male quartet on the
Trinity Broadcasting Network warbling harmoniously,
For the Christian who manages through the Holy Spirit to ‘‘behold the face
of God,’’ presumably on a regular basis, separation is over. The memorial
magic has worked. The worshiper will never again have to ‘‘stand alone.’’
God’s ‘‘compassion’’ will belong to him forever. He will be in, symbiotically
in, the gravitational orbit of the Big One, face to face with his heavenly Lord.
It can hardly come as a surprise to learn at this juncture that Christianity’s
infantilizing process plays upon both our primal longings and fears by meta-
phorically equating the presence of God’s ‘‘face’’ with light and the absence
of God’s ‘‘face’’ with darkness. To be out of the symbiotic orbit of mutual face
gazing, in short, is to be lost in the dark. We’ve already had a sample of this
through Augustine’s declaration that to be in the ‘‘darkness’’ of fleshly
176 Becoming God’s Children
thoughts and deeds is to be ‘‘far’’ from the ‘‘face’’ of the Lord.42 The connec-
tion of the Almighty’s countenance to the light derives principally from the
Psalms where we find ‘‘Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy
Throne: mercy and truth shall go before Thy face. Blessed is the people that
know the joyful sound: They shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy counte-
nance’’ (Ps. 89:14–15). And again, ‘‘Make thy face to shine upon thy servant;
save me for thy mercies’ sake’’ (Ps. 31:16). And finally, ‘‘Turn us again,
O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved’’ (Ps. 80:3).
(We must note here that the longing for God’s ‘‘face’’ to ‘‘shine’’ already holds
by implication the suggestion of darkness, or shining’s opposite.) For God to
‘‘hide’’ His ‘‘face,’’ to turn away from His servants, to ‘‘cast off ’’ their ‘‘souls,’’
is to leave them ‘‘in the dark,’’ to prevent them from ‘‘knowing’’ His ‘‘right-
eousness’’ and His ‘‘wonder’’ (Ps. 88:12–15). In the eye of the Christian, of
course, it is Jesus Himself Who embodies the ‘‘light’’ of ‘‘the world’’
(John 12:46). To follow Him is to live in the light; to reject Him is to reside
in the darkness: ‘‘I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth
on me should not abide in the darkness’’ (John 12:46). And again,
Then Jesus said to them, yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye
have the light, lest darkness come upon you; for he that walketh in darkness
knoweth not wither he goest. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye
may be the children of light. These things spoke Jesus, and departed, and did
hide himself from them.
(John 12: 35–36, my emphasis)
(Note the reference to Jesus’s followers as ‘‘children’’ and the link to the
Psalms through the notion of ‘‘hiding.’’) Everywhere in the teachings and
traditions of the creed we find this dichotomy underscored, with an emphasis
on the ‘‘child’’ or the ‘‘children.’’ Writes Saint Paul in his Epistle to the
Ephesians, ‘‘For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the
Lord; walk as children of light’’ (5:8). Prays Anderson in his volume Who I
Am in Christ,
Dear Heavenly Father, thank You for rescuing me from the domain of darkness.
Because of your great grace, I announce that I am no longer a child of darkness
but a child of light, and I choose to walk in the light and ask that you would
enable me to do so.43
Note this remarkable passage from God Speaks: Devotional that makes per-
fectly clear the manner in which Christianity employs this theme as part of
the infantilizing process, including the face of the Lord, indeed the very eyes
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 177
of the Lord, watching over His little boys and girls, just as ‘‘Mom and
Dad’’ do:
Almost every kid has experienced the excitement and intrigue of a backyard
camp out. . . . If you’ve been on one of these daring adventures, you know the
one thing no one counts on is the darkness. The trees in the yard, so innocent
by day, cast menacing shadows at night. Unfamiliar sounds, impossible to iden-
tify in the dark, begin to wear away at your resolve. The whole thing starts to
feel pretty scary. Just when you’re about to bolt for the house, you look up
and see Mom and Dad watching from the window, ready to rescue you at a
moment’s notice. The world can be a dark, scary place. It can cast long, menac-
ing shadows over our lives that leave us feeling alone and fearful. That’s when
we need to look up and see our heavenly Father watching, ready to chase away
our fears and give us the courage to make it through the night.44
God Speaks: Devotional concludes the passage with these words from
I Pet. 3:12, ‘‘The Lord is watching His children.’’ Surely the psychological/
neurological significance of all this is apparent.
Just as the presence of God’s ‘‘face’’ mnemonically awakens the symbiotic
interaction of the early period, the mutual face-gazing activity through which
the little one finds his ‘‘map,’’ his direction, his security in the environment in
which he discovers himself, so does the absence of God’s ‘‘face,’’ the ‘‘hiding’’
of God’s ‘‘face,’’ the notion of the Big One leaving his children ‘‘in the dark’’
(Ps. 88:12) awaken the primal anxiety of the opening years, the fear of sep-
aration, the inward desolation of the ‘‘little child’’ when no one is there, when
he’s on his own. Christianity’s infantilizing magic operates vigorously from
both sides of the ‘‘facial’’ dichotomy, the presence of God’s ‘‘face’’ calling up
the Holy Spirit, or the conviction of the truth of the creed, the absence of
God’s ‘‘face’’ arousing elemental fears and through such painful arousal the
desire to join in with the flock, to track after the Shepherd, to enter the body
of Christ, the orbit of the Almighty’s gravitational power. As that grand old
American hymn O God, I Cried, No Dark Disguise has it, ‘‘The soul can split
the sky in two/And let the face of God shine through.’’45 It is time now to
reject both sides of the ‘‘facial’’ dichotomy, to say no to both the infantilizing
longings and the infantilizing fears, to grow up, indeed to face up to the real-
ities of our separateness, our smallness in the immensity of the cosmos, and
our own temporal, transient, mortal natures. No matter what the adapta-
tional benefits of Christianity’s magical procedures may be, the price we pay
for them in the distortion of our basic perception of the world around us is
too high. To put it somewhat differently, it is time now to say ‘‘Boo!’’ boo
to the mysterious faces and spirits and ghosts and presences, boo to all the
178 Becoming God’s Children
denizens of the putative supernatural realm, boo to every thing, including the
‘‘darkness,’’ that would lead us away from the light of our reason, our ration-
ality, our empiricism, our skepticism in the face of extraordinary claims—in
short, our trust in our own down-to-earth perceptions as we experience them,
and critically examine them, each and every worthwhile day of our lives.
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they [the Apostles] were all with
one accord in one place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind,
and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And then appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon
each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other
tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation
under heaven.
Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were
confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
And they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, Behold, are
not all these which speak Galilaeans?
And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?
Parthians and Medes, . . . Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our
tongues the wonderful works of God. . . .
Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said unto them . . .
this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel;
And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my
Spirit upon all flesh; . . .
180 Becoming God’s Children
And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord
shall be saved.
(Acts 2:1–21)
Thus, 50 days after the resurrection of Christ (from the Greek pentekoste, lit-
erally 50th day) the Apostles receive from the Holy Spirit both the linguistic
means and the inner resolve to go out into the world and preach the Gospel.
What does this material signify from a naturalistic or realistic angle? We will
never know, of course. In all likelihood, we have a tendentious, Scriptural
rendering of some sort of hallucinatory, cultic contagion (or ‘‘enthusiasm’’)
that transpired among Jesus’s early followers as Christianity began to insert
itself into the surrounding culture.
As for the Pentecostal movement transpiring around us today, it com-
menced toward the turn of the twentieth century, as follows (note the linkage
between rebirth and the Holy Spirit): ‘‘On New Year’s Day 1901 in Topeka,
Kansas,’’ write Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman,
a young woman named Agnes Ozman, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, was
about to be transported to a strange wondrous place—not by a tornado, but
through a born-again experience. She asked her teacher, Charles Parham, to
lay his hands on her and pray, and when he did, she began to speak in a lan-
guage no one had ever heard before. Some of the Bible students thought she
was babbling, and others thought she was speaking Chinese, but they all agreed
that she had been touched by the Holy Spirit and given the gift of ‘‘speaking in
tongues.’’ On that day was born the Pentecostal movement.48
The extent of the ‘‘movement’s’’ current popularity and influence must not be
underestimated. As a ‘‘spiritual’’ activity, glossolalia is reaching into all the major
denominations of the creed, with millions of devotees either engaged directly or
bearing pious, devotional witness to the practice. According to a recent Pew
Forum poll, Pentecostalists (or ‘‘charismatics’’ or ‘‘renewalists’’ as they are also
called) ‘‘are the fastest-growing religious group, approximately one-fourth of
the world’s two billion Christians,’’ including approximately 23 percent of
Christian Americans.49 Since the 1960s, the movement has leapt from tradi-
tional Pentecostal denominations ‘‘to mainline Protestant and Catholic congre-
gations. There are tongue-speaking Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians,
and Catholics’’ (p. 9d). There are, of course, dissenters, too, Christians who
deem speaking in tongues ‘‘phony, weird, or even dangerous’’ (p. 9d); but at
the moment, it seems, nothing is able to markedly diminish the enthusiasm.
The ‘‘gift of tongues,’’ writes Terry R. Baughman, pastor of The Pentecostals
of Pleasanton (California), ‘‘is evidence of the spirit of God within us. . . .
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 181
We see it as filling a God-shaped hole in the heart of man’’ (p. 9d). In other
words, to develop the pastor’s metaphor, the whole business is related primarily
to ‘‘man’s’’ longing for emotional fulfillment, emotional connectedness, through
some kind of merger or union with the Deity, a ‘‘spiritual’’ behavior that will fill
the practitioner with the Godhead, end the separation, the loneliness, and the
longing that comes inevitably to the human creature as he finds himself out there
on his own as opposed to in there with the Big One.
What happens exactly, or perhaps one should say outwardly, when
a speaker in tongues manifests his gift, his supernatural visitation from
the Holy Spirit? We’ve had a brief taste of this already from Newberg and
Waldman; here is further material from their text:
What . . . is speaking in tongues? What does it sound like, and what does it
mean? Even though the practice was widespread in the first half of the twentieth
century, very few researchers took a strong interest in it, and not until 1977 did
an ethnomusicologist, Jeff Titon, make a recording of this remarkable speech
during a Pentecostal revival meeting. The following glossolalic passage, spelled
out phonetically, was made from that recording (the phonetic symbol ‘‘?’’ refers
to a guttural sound made in the back of the esophagus):
Kantasaborovo santolavo ilamasax rabaxo kalarabou. risadalabo pita
rebasa toyen santoraba satrobaho satoya. rika salara santo labor ‘‘?’’ bokoli
risantobo santayabadiante ikolorosi balso kolorianti
In the early years of the apostolic faith missions, their publications often
claimed that parishioners spoke in foreign languages that these people had never
learned [thus echoing the New Testament]. Researchers call this form of
tongue-speaking xenolalia or xenoglossia; but over the years, as linguists dis-
proved such claims, belief in xenolalia died out. Instead, parishoners came to
believe that glossolalics were speaking the language of God.
(pp. 194–95)
Researchers who have studied glossolalia have not found linguistic evidence that
any form of language is being spoken. Rather, the person is loosely stringing
together and repeating familiar phonetic sounds. Nevertheless, in some
churches, ministers and parishioners claim to be able to interpret the utterances,
though in other groups it is only the speaker who privately intuits the meaning.
(p. 195)
Standing at her sink, washing the breakfast dishes, Mrs. Rogers spoke out loud.
She said, ‘‘Jana, Kanna, saree saree Kanai, Katai, akanna Kanai Karai Yahai,
of saramai, saramoyai, iana Kanna.’’ Mrs. Rogers was speaking in tongues—
technically called glossolalia. She did not know what the words meant, but
she felt a quiet contentment as she talked and sung the strange syllables. Some
days she spoke only a word or two in this way before she changed to English,
but that morning, she uttered the rhythmic sounds for about ten minutes and
stopped only when she had finishing scouring . . . the frying pan. . . . Speaking
in tongues still seemed strange to Mrs. Rogers, though she had been doing it
for more than a year. She felt as if she had been given the ability to speak in a
new language, without having to trouble too much about what the words
actually meant. It was a pleasant, effortless thing to do and often filled her with
a sense of well-being.50
It does not matter, then, whether or not the glossolalist is alone or in a group
of fellow glossolalists, or in or out of a church setting.
Let’s begin to develop this last aspect of the behavior, I mean the psychologi-
cal/neurological direction from which feelings of ‘‘love’’ and ‘‘acceptance’’
well up in the glossolalist as he pronounces his nonsensical syllables.
We must bear in mind firmly as we go that the glossolalists with whom we
are dealing are invariably Christians, which is to say individuals who have
already undergone Christianity’s infantilizing process, who regard themselves
as the Almighty’s ‘‘little children,’’ who depend on their Shepherd/Savior for
guidance, for sustenance, for protection, for affection—for everything they
require as needful, vulnerable denizens of the planet. To put it another way,
we must realize as we proceed that our glossolalists, our speakers, are looking
to enhance their personal relationship with the Deity as it has been, and is,
presented to them doctrinally by the overall magical formulations of the
creed. As one of the glossolalists in Kildahl declares when asked what his
activity has accomplished for him,
seal to prove we belong to Him. Christ is alive in us. He leads and guides. . . .
He pulls us back from danger and covers us from unknown danger.
(p. 8, my emphasis)
We’ve heard all this before, of course, and may think of it as the Christian
condition: the speaker of the magical words is God’s ‘‘child’’; he ‘‘belongs’’ to
the Deity as the little one belongs to the parent; he perceives another being,
namely, Christ, ‘‘alive’’ in him, which means he perceives himself united with,
merged with, the Big One symbiotically such that he ‘‘walks’’ and ‘‘talks’’ with
another, supernatural entity (or internalized object, in psychological terms)
who ‘‘leads’’ him, ‘‘guides’’ him (the pastoral metaphor), protects him from
danger, indeed covers him up (the umbilical cocoon) from the anxiety-
inducing future of ‘‘unknown’’ threats. The aim of glossolalia, then, is to
intensify, to deepen the orthodox, infantilizing agenda of the Christian reli-
gion, and our business here is to understand in at least a preliminary way just
how such a deepening comes about.
A significant clue emerges as we observe investigators underscoring the
similarities between the glossolalist’s productions and the babbling of infants
and small children. ‘‘What some authorities call ‘infantile babble,’ ’’ writes
Kildahl, ‘‘is more scientifically described as similar to the second or parataxic
phase of an infant’s attempts to communicate. During this period the toddler
repeats sounds which are meaningless to the listener but satisfying to the
child. Another speech pattern typical of this level of development,’’ Kildahl
goes on,
involves dual or collective monologues (Piaget). The youngster still does not
make sense of his speech, but is stimulated by the presence of another person
or persons who are not included in the monologue or expected to respond to
it. Wayne E. Oates believes that this accurately describes the phenomenon of
glossolalia. The distortions of speech which appear at the time are submerged
by the child as he matures. According to Oates, these distortions reappear in
tongue-speaking.
(pp. 31–32)
Also significant is the section in Newberg and Waldman titled ‘‘The Pen-
tecostal Brain in Action’’ (p. 197), wherein we discover at the experimental,
clinical level that speaking in tongues triggers a decrease in the activity of the
frontal lobes (p. 200). ‘‘This is a very unusual finding,’’ according to these
authors, because the language that arises from the ‘‘glossolalic state’’ is always
‘‘highly structured’’ and ‘‘filled with clearly articulated phrases’’ (p. 200).
Apparently, they contend, the language of the tongue-speaker is ‘‘being
184 Becoming God’s Children
With ‘‘decreased activity in your frontal lobes,’’ Newberg and Waldman con-
tinue, ‘‘you would have the conscious experience that ‘something else’ was
running the show.’’ Even ‘‘glossolalic people who were trained to speak a
pseudo language also had the sense that they were being overtaken by an out-
side or foreign source’’ (p. 201). Accordingly, if the ‘‘goal’’ of the ‘‘Pentecostal
tradition’’ is to ‘‘be transformed’’ through a ‘‘new religious experience’’ as
Newberg and Waldman contend (p. 202), we may clearly perceive the
psychological/neurological direction from which the ‘‘transformation’’ occurs
by simply linking together the transformation’s principal ingredients, namely,
(1) infantile or child-like babbling, (2) decreased activity in the frontal lobes
(decreased cognition), and (3) the sense of being ‘‘overtaken’’ (taken over) by
an ‘‘outside’’ or ‘‘foreign’’ source. When all of this successfully transpires, in
other words, when the speaker in tongues succeeds in imitating (homeopathic
magic) the original relationship between the helpless, babbling, dependent
little one and the all-controlling, all-directing, parental Deity, the infantiliz-
ing conduct arouses the cerebrally rooted, implicit recollection of the period
during which the arrangement actually obtained. This is an arousal that
Pentecostal Christianity invariably celebrates as confirmational, faith-bound
visitation from the mysterious Holy Spirit (the ‘‘religious experience’’) Who
just happens to be doctrinally not merely a spirit but a person, too. We may
recall here, following Henry Cloud and John Townsend, that Christianity’s
deepest aim, deepest purpose, is to foster in the practitioner a ‘‘moment-to-
moment relationship of dependency’’ between the worshiper and his loving
Lord, Jesus Christ, and that it is the Holy Spirit specifically Who prompts
the worshiper to ‘‘yield and follow,’’ to permit the Deity to ‘‘control’’ and
‘‘guide’’ him throughout the course of his earthly existence.51 Can one think
of a better way to accomplish this orthodox purpose, startling as it is,
than to babble like an infant, to inhibit the directional influence of one’s
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 185
A little girl walking down the street holding her daddy’s hand feels serene and
safe in a unique way. She holds his big, strong hand, and she rests joyfully in
the belief that nothing can happen that her daddy cannot handle. She feels
loved and she feels protected. Our research gave evidence that the believing
tongue-speaker approaches this same feeling of euphoria. He believes that he is
in the hands of God. He believes that he has proof of it because he can speak
in tongues.
(p. 51, my emphasis)
it surges up in one when all of this, or a significant measure of it, begins work-
ing in the worshiper, begins awakening implicitly and mnemonically the time
of his earthly experience when he was, in fact, at ‘‘an early level of maturity,’’
when he was, in fact, less ‘‘rational’’ and more ‘‘child-like,’’ when his ‘‘frontal
lobes’’ were, in fact, only partially developed, when he was, in fact, led around
by a big one upon whom he wholly depended. And it is precisely, and sadly,
these naturalistic, biological recollections, efficacious and unseen, that con-
vince the worshiper of his religion’s veracity, its ‘‘truth,’’ and, of course, its
guiding, salvational role in his existence (adaptational tracking). What is
happening entirely on the inside is attributed psychologically and cognitively
to a putative supernatural presence on the outside, as the fundamental
misconception of the world goes solemnly or joyously forward.
Now that we grasp the infantilizing core of the Christian faith, now that
we perceive its magical, wishful, reversional nature, its intention to rescue,
to ‘‘save’’ its lost, mortal adherents by restoring them to the pattern, the
map, of the pastoral metaphor, with the little one tracking after the Big
One, we have no choice but to reject it once and for all as grown-up men
and women. Indeed, the very suggestion that a human being can rely upon
his ‘‘faith’’ as opposed to his mature, analytical, critical rationality for his
guidance in the world is in and of itself an infantilizing move, an attempt
to steer the adherent toward a ‘‘child-like’’ acceptance of supernatural, institu-
tional claims as opposed to an uncompromising probe into their perceptional
foundations. We made plain in a previous chapter that for Christianity faith
is ‘‘prayer and nothing but prayer.’’53 We also made plain that to pray success-
fully the Christian worshiper must adopt an utterly helpless, dependent,
child-like attitude; he must turn to the Big One ‘‘as the child in distress turns
to his mother.’’54 In short, he must act out his ‘‘reversion’’ to an ‘‘early level of
maturity’’ through an emotional performance of homeopathic magic, just as
the glossolalic acts out his own babbling reversion through his own unforget-
table, pitiable display. When it comes to such behavior, such conduct, such
‘‘faith,’’ we must now say emphatically, no—not only to Christianity but to
any religion or institution or organization or collection of lost souls looking
for some way, any way, of adapting themselves to the relentless actualities of
the natural universe around them. Already for millions of people on the
planet the game is up; the long age of religious magic is over. Perhaps in some
future era the majority of human beings, still under the spell of spirits and
suchlike, will also be delivered, will also be released from the addictive trance
state of infantilization. We can’t know, of course, but we can hopefully antici-
pate, and while we’re at it, work to diminish the world’s religious confusion as
much as we possibly can.
188 Becoming God’s Children
Notes
1. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1975), p. 284.
2. Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of Mind
(New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 161.
3. Ibid., pp. 79, 81, 152, 161, 163, 167.
4. I continue to employ the King James Version of Scripture, as I will do through-
out the course of the book.
5. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 182.
6. Alexander Cruden, Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testa-
ments (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1949), p. 483.
7. See Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 182. See also Gerald M. Edelman,
The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic
Books, 1989).
8. Anne Graham Lotz, I Saw the Lord (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006),
p. 140.
9. Neil T. Anderson, Who I Am in Christ (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1993),
p. 134.
10. Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King, Experiencing God (Nashville, TN:
Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1994, pp. 36–37.
11. Cited in G. P. Fisher, A History of Christian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1978), p. 321.
12. H. Richard Niebuhr, Faith on Earth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1989), p. 95.
13. Louise Kendall and R. T. Kendall, eds., Great Christian Prayers (London: Hod-
der and Stoughton, 2000), p. 3.
14. Hanspeter A. Mallot, ‘‘Finding Our Way,’’ Scientific American Mind 16, no. 1
(May 2005): 70–77. This citation is on p. 77 of the article.
15. See David Roth and Sidney J. Blatt, ‘‘Spatial Representations of Psychopathol-
ogy,’’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 22 (1994): 871.
16. Blackaby and King, Experiencing God, p. 36 (see note 10).
17. Tim Gustafson, ed., Our Daily Bread, 51, nos. 3, 4, 5 (June, July,
August 2006): 28. Published by RBC Ministries, USA.
18. Ibid., p. 35.
19. N.A., God Speaks: Devotional (Tulsa, OK: Honor Books, 2000), p. 149.
20. Kendall and Kendall, Great Christian Prayers, p. 360 (my emphasis). See
note 4.
21. See John R. Hinnells, ed., The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1997), p. 383.
22. Janet Collins, ‘‘Spiritual Journeys,’’ Vancouver Sun, May 26, 2007, p. G5.
23. See note 11.
24. Billy Graham, The Holy Spirit (New York: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 1978), p. 10.
Tracking the Parent-God: The Pastoral Metaphor 189
25. See Berton L. Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of Christian
Myth (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 1–41. That Jesus actually existed is
highly probable but not certain.
26. Allen C. Myers, The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1987), p. 373.
27. Romano Guardini, Prayer in Practice, trans. L. Loewenstein-Wertheim
(London: Burns and Oates, 1957), p. 26.
28. James Shreeve, ‘‘Beyond the Brain,’’ National Geographic 207, no. 3
(March 2005): 25.
29. Elizabeth Svodoba, ‘‘Faces, Faces Everywhere,’’ New York Times, February 13,
2007, p. F6.
30. Frederick V. Malmstrom, ‘‘Close Encounters of the Facial Kind,’’ Skeptic 11,
no. 4 (2005): 45–47.
31. Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com-
pany, 1990), p. 40.
32. George A. Buttrick, So We Believe, So We Pray (New York: Abingdon-
Cokesbury, 1994), p. 30.
33. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 111.
34. See note 27 above.
35. Tim Stafford, Knowing the Face of God (Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress,
1996), pp. 182–83.
36. N.A., God Speaks: Devotional, p. 133.
37. Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 51.
38. Kendall and Kendall, eds., Great Christian Prayers, p. 47.
39. Albert Christ-Janer, ed., American Hymns Old and New (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), p. 663.
40. Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. Rex Warner
(New York: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 21.
41. The Gospel Hour, Trinity Broadcasting Network, October 11, 2008, 7:00 p.m.,
Channel 40, Orange County, California.
42. See note 40 above.
43. Anderson, Who I Am in Christ, p. 94.
44. N.A., God Speaks: Devotional, p. 145.
45. Christ-Janer, American Hymns Old and New, p. 694.
46. Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (New York, Barnes and Noble,
1996), p. 1831.
47. Ibid., p. 813.
48. Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldham, Why We Believe What
We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth
(New York: The Free Press, 2006), p. 191.
49. Kimberly Winston, ‘‘Faith’s Language Barrier?’’ USA Today, May 24, 2007, p. 9d.
50. John P. Kildahl, The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues (New York: Harper and
Row, 1972), p. 1.
190 Becoming God’s Children
51. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, God Will Make a Way (Nashville, TN:
Integrity Publishers, 2002), pp. 96–99.
52. Jonathan Haidt, ‘‘Honey, I Shrunk the President,’’ Los Angeles Times,
December 16, 2007, p. M4.
53. Friedrich Heiler, Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion
(New York: Oxford University Press, [1932] 1997), p. xiii.
54. Guardini, Prayer in Practice, p. 77.
CHAPTER 4
Growing Up:
A Concluding Word
and receive,’’ to call upon his Parent-God for guidance, for support, for suste-
nance and love as an utterly helpless, utterly dependent little one. Prayer for
the Christian, this kind of prayer, becomes synonymous with faith itself.
The worshiper is told by his theological mentors to adopt an attitude of
moment-to-moment dependency on Christ as he goes about his business in
the world; without Jesus Christ, Christian teaching informs him, ‘‘he can
do nothing’’ (John 15:5). His entire life, at every instant of it, becomes a kind
of behavioral prayer, an open acknowledgment of his total reliance on the Big
One who watches over him. Through the pastoral metaphor that resides at
the core of the Christian tradition, the worshiper is advised to regard his
God as his Shepherd and himself as a sheep, following dutifully after the
all-controlling, all-providing supernatural Guide who leads him to food, to
water, to safety, to rest, and to the eternal home or ‘‘house’’ in which he will
abide permanently without a hint of separation, or aloneness. ‘‘Heaven,’’ we
are informed in the popular Christian literature of today, ‘‘is a great big hug
that lasts forever.’’4 Through the Eucharist the worshiper participates in a
transparently magical ceremony, a conjuration if there ever was one, wherein
he actually or symbolically feeds upon the body of his Deity, ingests His
blood and His flesh, mixes fluids and solids in sacred symbiosis, merging
Jesus with himself and himself with Jesus who becomes his ‘‘bread of life.’’
Finally for our purposes here, Jesus instructs His ‘‘little children’’ to obey
Him at all times, to do ‘‘whatsoever’’ He ‘‘commands’’ them to do, and if they
don’t do that, if they don’t become and remain good little girls and boys, then
they run the risk of losing their precious Leader, for as Jesus makes plain, only
those who obey Him may regard themselves as His ‘‘friend’’ (John 15:14).
What we have in all this, obviously, is a vivid psychological-mythic presenta-
tion of the basic biological situation, a thinly disguised depiction of our
earthly beginnings designed to arouse the worshiper’s implicit recollection
of his life-or-death involvement with his original caregivers such that he
may feel within himself both the ‘‘truth’’ of the Christian narrative and an
actual opportunity to reimmerse himself magically into an idealized version
of his precious interpersonal, opening days. When this occurs and the wor-
shiper adopts fully the particulars of his religion, he is said to have experi-
enced a visitation from the ‘‘Holy Spirit.’’
Here is the point: as we come to see all this fully, to demystify the sacred rite
and doctrine through realistic neuropsychological analysis, to fathom the mag-
ical process of infantilization in which the religion’s power is ultimately rooted,
we realize that Christianity provides us with precious, indeed invaluable under-
standing of what it means to mature as men and women, to accomplish pre-
cisely the opposite of a wishful return to an infantilized state of mind and
Growing Up: A Concluding Word 193
who look out for me.’’11 What Graham and his followers need to be told,
politely, should be perfectly clear at this point: grow up; stop the silly super-
natural nonsense, and just grow up; surely it is time to do that now; we are all
simply regular human beings attempting to thrive on the surface of the planet;
there is no such thing as a guardian angel, okay?
Finally, we grow as we fully accept our mortality, as we refuse to indulge
ourselves in what Ernest Becker calls in a famous phrase, ‘‘the denial of
death.’’12 We don’t say to ourselves as we contemplate our biological cessa-
tion, maybe I won’t really die after all; or, maybe death is only a transition
to another mode of being; or, I believe my soul will live on; or, I’ll be with
my loving Jesus forever; or, maybe I’ll be reincarnated as a flamingo and go
soaring off into the sunset, or some such. We consider Christianity’s denial
of death (Jesus arises from the grave; salvation is available through Christ)
to be a major facet of its infantilizing process and the ultimate witness to its
overall failure of nerve; for in the last analysis that is what Christianity boils
down to as an approach to our human existence, a failure of nerve. There
can be no growing up until one honestly faces up to the ineluctable reality of
his or her demise and permanent disappearance from the universe. To put it
in the paradoxical terms to which we’re accustomed, to ‘‘be’’ dead is to ‘‘be’’
nonexistent. Moreover, we are supremely aware at this point in our develop-
ment as thoughtful creatures that the denial of death is routinely acted out in
myriad violent ways, most notably in the destruction of other living entities.
For many human beings within a variety of sociocultural contexts, including
war, homicide, and hunting, to kill is to experience deep within mind and
body an exhilarating sense of one’s aliveness and hence, a reduction of one’s
anxiety over death. Accordingly, as grown-ups, we will actively seek to explain
and hopefully to diminish the denial of death whenever an opportunity to do
so presents itself. And if all of this somehow hurts, if we undergo anxiety, and
sadness, and anguish, and actual psychic and physical pain as we face up to
the facts, well, so be it. We can say to ourselves, perhaps, something like this:
better to have one moment of honest, face-to-face contact with things as they
are, no matter how much death anxiety that engenders, than have a lifetime
of comforting illusions.
Omar Khayyám writes in famous lines of verse,
Notes
1. Baptism is discussed fully at the inception of Chapter 3, Part One.
2. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications,
1994), p. 312.
3. All the scriptural quotations in this book are from the King James Version of
the Bible.
Growing Up: A Concluding Word 197
4. Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup for the Christian Soul (Deerfield Beach, FL: Heath
Communications, 1997), p. 294.
5. Géza Róheim, Magic and Schizophrenia (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1955), pp. 45–46. For an additional interesting discussion of these matters,
see Marcia Cavell, ‘‘Self Knowledge and Self-Understanding,’’ American Imago 65,
no. 3 (Fall 2008): 357–78.
6. See note 4 above.
7. Jack Van Impe Presents, Trinity Broadcasting Network, September 16, 2008,
7:00 p.m., Channel 40, Orange County, California.
8. Anne Graham Lotz, I Saw the Lord (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006),
pp. 88–90.
9. See Roheim, note 5 above.
10. Billy Graham, Angels: God’s Secret Agents (New York: Doubleday, 1954),
pp. 72, 93.
11. The author’s quotation.
12. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973).
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Index